More than 470,000 still without power in Midwest

More than 470,000 homes and businesses were still without power Monday after snow and ice storms on January 27 and 28 left nearly 1.7 million customers in the dark from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, local utilities reported.

The storms hit Kentucky the hardest, leaving more than 700,000 customers in the Bluegrass State without power.

E.ON US, which owns Louisville Gas and Electric Co and Kentucky Utilities Co, said it could take seven to 10 days to restore service to all 138,000 customers still without service.

E.ON US, a subsidiary of German energy company E.ON AG, owns and operates about 8,000 megawatts of generating capacity and transmits and distributes electricity to more than 900,000 customers and natural gas to more than 325,000 customers in Kentucky.

High temperatures in Louisville, the biggest city in Kentucky, would fall from near normal levels of 4C to 7C to well below normal levels -7C to 2C on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to forecasts by AccuWeather.com.

In Arkansas, another hard hit state, the electric co-operatives, which serve about 490,000 customers, said outages peaked at about 300,000. The co-ops still had more than 70,000 homes and businesses in the dark Monday morning.

After crashing across the Midwest, the storm dropped a lot of snow in the Northeast before moving off the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean by the middle of last week.

Snow, however, does not disrupt power service like ice. Ice accumulates on trees and branches, snapping them onto power lines.

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