Sep 16, 2008 4:47 pm US/Eastern
Crews Work To Restore Power To Hard Hit Areas
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
Thousands of people still have no power after Sunday night's powerful winds that downed trees and power lines.
The remnants of Hurricane Ike meant winds were clocked at 67 mph at Pittsburgh International Airport.
This morning, two dozen schools had to cancel classes because of a lack of electricity.
"The whole district was closed yesterday, which I think, in hindsight, was a very good thing to do because the roads were bad, along with these buildings were on and off during the course of the day," said Jo Welter, the Hampton School District Assistant Superintendent. "Now today, everybody is in school with the exception of our middle school students. That is about 800 kids. We think because there are downed power lines in the back of the building, we think that is the problem. We are anticipating it may be a half day or full day of work, once they get back there to fix all that."
The outage at the middle school has been one of many problems at the Hampton Township and around the area.
There are nearly too many downed power lines to count.
"The winds they clocked in certain areas were 79, 80 miles per hour," said Joe Vallarian of Duquesne Light. "A category 1 hurricane is 75. Really, for all intensive purposes we had a hurricane in Pittsburgh. It did a lot of damage, you know, thousands of cases of wires down at one point, broken poles, trees down everywhere, those things take time."
Duquesne Light hopes to have all customers in eastern Allegheny County back on-line by late Thursday.
Residents of the North Hills, South Hills, Western Allegheny County and Beaver County should have their power restored no later than late Friday.
Here's a breakdown of how the companies are doing so far:
Allegheny Power – 31, 862 outages
Duquesne Light – 20,000 outages
Penn Power – 21,000 outages
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