One county was under a state of emergency and about 64,000 electric customers across western Pennsylvania remained without power Wednesday, three days after gusty winds from the remnants of Hurricane Ike downed power lines and trees.
Utilities serving the region said some customers would not get their power restored until Friday or later.
The emergency declaration in Butler County, north of Pittsburgh, allowed the Red Cross to open two shelters, said Frank Matis, the county's emergency services director. As of Wednesday morning, 25,000 customers in the county had no power and Tuesday's declaration also allowed the county, which has a population of about 180,000, to make emergency purchases of supplies.
Wind gusts of more than 70 mph were reported Sunday and were blamed for the death of a man struck by a falling branch.
Another man, Robert Lempke, 43, of Columbia, N.J., was electrocuted about 2:20 p.m. Tuesday when he stepped on a live wire in Delaware Township, Mercer County, according to state police. He was a New Jersey Central Power & Light employee working to repair power lines.
At a Red Cross shelter set up at Knoch Middle School, people trickled in throughout the day to eat pizza and salad or take showers. The school is about 20 miles north of Pittsburgh in an area of farmland and housing developments.
"This doesn't fall into our normal Red Cross response as a disaster, but falls into a community need we could respond to," said Jody Knights, executive director of the Butler County chapter of the American Red Cross.
The Red Cross set up the shelters because it was getting about a dozen calls an hour, Knights said. Another dozen people stopped at a shelter at Slippery Rock Area High School, in the county's northern end.
"The biggest problem was people who didn't have drinking water," Knights said, or people needing help with electrically powered medical equipment. In such cases, she said, equipment vendors were contacted.
Two volunteer fire stations and three water stations provided drinking water.
The Red Cross planned to keep the shelters open until 8 a.m. Wednesday, close them for school and reopen at 4 p.m.
FirstEnergy hoped to restore service to a majority of its customers by Friday, but some might not have electricity into the weekend, spokeswoman Ellen Raines said. That utility, which does business as Penn Power in the area, reported about 23,000 customers were still without power Wednesday.
Another utility, Duquesne Light, said it expected electricity to be restored in eastern Allegheny County by late Thursday and other Pittsburgh suburbs and Beaver County by late Friday. It reported about 18,000 customers still without power Wednesday.
Allegheny Power had about 23,000 people without power in southwestern Pennsylvania by Wednesday morning and hoped to have power back on by Friday or Saturday, a spokeswoman said.
"This was a very extensive storm with significant damages to our facilities and equipment," Raines said.
Most of the damage was from limbs falling on power lines.
Southern parts of Butler County and the county's northwest corner were hardest hit by the outages, Matis said.
Philadelphia-based Peco Energy sent about 30 workers to help Duquesne Light restore power.
Duquesne Light spokesman Joseph Vallarian said it had sent 14 workers to assist in Texas because of Ike, but called them back because of the problems here.
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