Isabel Cuts Power to 4.5 Million!

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A weakened Hurricane Isabel was grinding north through the Mid-Atlantic states early Friday after knocking out power to more than 4.5 million homes and businesses from the Carolinas to New York.

Dominion reported nearly 1.7 million customers, more than half of the 2.2 million served by its Virginia and North Carolina utilities, were without power early Friday, eclipsing the 1.1 million lost during Hurricane Fran in 1996.

"This is a record-breaking storm for us in terms of its speed, its swath. The storm is massive," said David Botkins, spokesman for Richmond, Virginia-based Dominion Resources Inc. , parent of Virginia's biggest electric company.

Isabel, although downgraded late Thursday to a tropical storm, was working its way across Pennsylvania and western New York, packing 40 mph (64 kph) winds and drenching rains.

That spells trouble for power lines running through leafy neighborhoods where the sodden ground cannot hold tree roots against the buffeting winds.

"The ground is saturated. We had a lot of rain this summer and in this wind the trees are just not holding," Dominion's Botkins said.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted up to 10 inches (24 cm) of rain and widespread flooding along the storm's track.

DANGEROUS WORK

Emergency line crews rushed to the region from as far away as Canada several days before the storm, a common mutual aid practice in the industry when a big hurricane comes calling.

But the wild weather was hampering their efforts.

Utilities in North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey and Delaware started restoring power last night.

But electric companies in Maryland and Pennsylvania said they expect their outages to increase as the storm marches through their states and residents wake up this morning and find that they have no electricity.

Dominion, one of the hardest-hit companies, said it would not have a full assessment of damage to its system until sometime on Friday and that it could take several days to get everyone's lights back on -- a comment echoed by nearly all the other utilities.

In North Carolina, where Isabel roared in from the Atlantic early Thursday, local electricity cooperatives reported about 117,000 customers still without service Friday morning, with a near total blackout in several coastal towns.

Farther inland, Raleigh-based Progress Energy Inc. said this morning it restored 175,000 of the 320,000 customers who lost power in North and South Carolina, while Duke Energy Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, restored more than 30,000 of the 131,000 customers left in the dark.

"We've got crews out restoring power, but expect our total outage numbers to rise as people wake up and report they don't have power," said Tom Welle of Pepco, which serves 720,000 customers in Washington, D.C. and its Maryland suburbs.

LASHING WASHINGTON

The federal government closed its offices in Washington for a second day, allowing Pepco, a subsidiary of Pepco Holdings Inc. , to start restoring service to 465,000 customers left in the dark in the capital and its surrounding suburbs.

"Unfortunately, we expect those numbers to keep going up as people call in. We estimate it will take about a week to get everyone back," Pepco's Welle said.

Conectiv, another Pepco utility, said 250,000 of its 1 million customers were without power in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland and southern New Jersey.

BGE, the Baltimore-based electric company owned by Constellation Energy Group Inc. , counted 629,000 customer outages, most of them in and around the Maryland capital of Annapolis.

Isabel, although packing less punishing winds as it moved inland, was plowing northwest through Pennsylvania and western New York where local utilities were bracing for more outages.

As the storm moves across Pennsylvania, the state's utilities have already reported a half million customers are without power, with more expected in the next couple of hours.

"The storm is just passing through our territory now. We expect the outages to increase a bit as the storm wears on," said Scott Surgeoner, a spokesman with FirstEnergy, which serves more than 1.2 million customers in Pennsylvania.