ComEd diligently working to restore power for thousands following Monday's powerful storms

(WBBM NEWSRADIO) - Three thousand utility workers are out today, helping ComEd restore power to hundreds of thousands of customers in the dark after Monday night’s massive storms.

Vice president of Project and Contract Management Neena Hemmady called the storms a massive challenge that rolled through their entire service area.

“We have downed trees, downed power lines,” Hemmady said. “We have broken poles. We have so much extensive damage throughout the territory. Now, the hardest hit areas were the south of our territory as well as the west.”

At the height of the outage, she said 430,000 customers were in the dark, with each customer potentially a household or business.

“Hospitals [were] impacted, nursing homes have been impacted,” Hemmady added. “This has been very wide set of damage across the system.

Some of the challenges crews are tackling include transmission towers that came down in the high winds along I-55 near Channahon.

“That damage is really an example of the kind of strength of the storm that went through the system,” Hemmady said.

She said ongoing power outages in Houston mean some ComEd crews are there.

“That does have some impact, but what we’re doing is getting help from neighboring utilities,” said Hemmady.

Those neighbors extend into Canada, where she said crews have come from to assist ComEd and closer utilities.

The utility pledges to have service restored to 80 percent of its customers by 3 p.m. tomorrow and 99.9 percent by Friday at 6 p.m.

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