At 9:30 p.m., Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. reported more than 180,000 customers without power. Harford County has the largest number of customers without power — about 48,900 — though Baltimore County was not far behind, with about 47,300 customers without power.
Also at 9:30 p.m.:
• Pepco, which serves Washington and its Maryland suburbs, was reporting about 15,500 of its customers without power.
• Delmarva Power, which serves the Delmarva peninsula, was reporting about 50,000 customers without power in its Maryland service areas at that time. Choptank Electric Cooperative was also reporting about 11,000 customers without power in the Maryland portion of the Delmarva peninsula.
• Potomac Edison was reporting about 27,600 customers without power in Western Maryland.
• Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, serving Southern Maryland, was reporting about 9,000 customers without power.
Since BGE's storm operations began at 10 a.m. Sunday, power has been restored to about 41,200 customers.
BGE has requested 3,000 additional field forces from outside the service area to assist with power restoration. So far, 1,700 extra workers have been confirmed, meaning they are either already working in the service area or are en route, said Rob Gould, a BGE spokesman.
Shortly after 4 p.m., BGE suspended work for crews using elevated bucket trucks because winds were becoming too intense for work to be done safely, he said.
"We can't safely do overhead work with bucket trucks when the wind exceeds 25 miles per hour," said Jeannette M. Mills, BGE's vice president for customer operations and chief customer officer, in a statement.
Crews will continue to respond to "true emergencies," such as downed wire situations, Gould said.
BGE has established five staging areas for its crews: M&T; Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen, the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport and Six Flags America in Upper Marlboro, he said.
From those locations, the crews will be dispatched to the communities where they will be working, Gould said.
BGE is encouraging all customers whose power goes out – even customers with Smart Meters – to call 877-778-2222 to report the outage.
Along with the outages came calls from politicians for Maryland's electric utilities to improve their infrastructure.
State senators Jim Rosapepe and Brian Frosh released a statement Monday evening saying that Hurricane Sandy exemplifies why the utilities need to "acknowledge climate change and modernize the electric infrastructure."
"It's past time for BGE and PEPCO to move into the 21st Century -- by making scientifically-based business decisions and investing in burying power lines and other modernizations of our electric power infrastructure to withstand extreme weather caused by climate change," Rosapepe said in the statement.
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