Roughly 400,000 homes and business were left without power Tuesday morning after severe storms raged across the Eastern United States on Monday.
Major power outages impacted over 140,000 utility customers in North Carolina, 103,000 customers in Pennsylvania, 70,000 customers in Maryland and 40,000 in Georgia early Tuesday, according to PowerOutage.us, CNN reported.
Dozens of people became trapped in their cars for hours in Westminster, Maryland, on Monday due to downed power lines, state police said.
One witness to the destruction, Jeffrey Campbell, told CNN that a utility pole fell onto vehicles near him, leaving live wires on the ground next to his truck. Campbell said he was trapped for hours while crews worked to make the power lines safe.
“It’s just poles coming down one after the other,” he said.
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The severe storms also brought a number of tornado warnings, impacting more than 40 million people from New York to Tennessee.
In Knoxville, the city’s utilities board said there was so much significant damage that it could take days for power to be restored to thousands of customers, WVLT reported.
“Our crews worked overnight and have made substantial progress restoring power to customers, reducing the number of outages to approximately 8,000. Because of the widespread and severe nature of the damage remaining, we expect repair work to span multiple days,” the Knoxville Utilities Board wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
“Many of the remaining outages require pole replacements, among other infrastructure repairs. Before repair work can begin on each piece of equipment, damage must be assessed and trees must be cleared. A single pole replacement takes at least eight hours and could take up to 12 hours to complete,” the board added. “With more than two dozen broken poles currently identified and more damage remaining to assess, we currently have more than 80 crews working, including two dozen crews from neighboring utilities.”
This was a breaking news story. The details were periodically updated as more information became available.
