It could take weeks to restore power to millions of people left in the dark by Hurricane Irene.
The lights went out for six million people and businesses, from Folly Beach, S.C., to Portland, Maine. The race to restore power now will hinge on thousands of utility workers.
Getting the lights back on will be an enormous job for repair crews fanning out throughout the East Coast. Irene ripped down power lines and crushed critical equipment near power plants. It flooded coastal cities with seawater, dousing electrical stations and threatening underground electrical wires. Crews are still assessing the damage.
"We're dark across the whole map," said Theresa Gilbert of Connecticut Light & Power. Irene blacked out half of the utility's 1.2 million customers Sunday, making it the worst outage in Connecticut history.
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More than five million homes and businesses remain without power. Some areas, like Manhattan, were relatively unscathed from the weekend storm while others will need days, or even weeks, to recover.
The outages could be critical for the elderly, the disabled and others who rely on community services.
"What if we're without power for days?" asked Pat Dillon, 52, who is partially paralyzed from a stroke. Dillon's senior care facility lost power when a generator failed. As he sat in the dark, Dillon worried that his wheelchair batteries would run out. Even worse, he needs to keep his diabetes medication chilled.
"Once the refrigerator gets warm, my insulin goes bad," he said. "I could go into diabetic shock."
Power companies say they'll try to get critical services running first. But many are just starting to understand the full extent of damage to the grid. Utility workers must comb through thousands of square miles to find out what's down before they can start repairs.
"It's going to be several days at least for our most severely damaged areas" to get power back, said Mike Hughes, a spokesman for Progress Energy in North Carolina, which serves about 3.1 million customers.
Lights already were flickering back to life in parts of the South, where the storm hit first. Crews have started clearing uprooted trees and reconnecting electrical lines. Power is returning to more than a million homes and businesses in the region. Utilities in southern Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland say they'd restored power to more than 1.3 million customers Sunday afternoon.
Power companies will focus on parts of their system where they can restore power to the most people at once.
Then they'll deal with smashed utility poles that serve individual neighborhoods.
Constellation Energy Nuclear Group said one of two nuclear reactors at Calvert Cliffs, Md. went off-line automatically because of Irene's winds. Constellation said the plant was safe.
As they switch off nuclear power plants, the utilities turn to other energy sources like natural gas-fired generators to keep the power flowing to customers.
