More than 14,000 customers in Carroll and Frederick counties - mostly in Mount Airy - were still without power yesterday as a result of the ice storm that swept through the region Wednesday.
Electrical service should be restored to all customers by noon today, said Allegheny Power spokesman Michael A. Grandillo.
He said that the company had restored power to about 60,000 customers since Thursday.
But the lights were still out for about 5,000 customers in Frederick County, 8,500 in Mount Airy and 850 in other parts of Carroll County and Western Maryland.
"Mount Airy is one of the hardest-hit areas, with trees down," Grandillo said. "Carroll County was where we had the biggest buildup of ice."
He said crews were working around the clock to restore electricity. The crews made large cuts in the number of customers without power when they repaired substations serving thousands.
"Now you'll probably see the numbers dropping more slowly because we have to go to individual houses," he said yesterday.
Grandillo said the worst outages came after the storm, on Wednesday night and Thursday, as branches frozen over with ice broke and hit power lines. At its worst, the outages affected about 120,000 Allegheny customers in Frederick and Carroll counties, he said.
The company has about 1.4 million customers in Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Allegheny received help from Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., which sent about 45 employees to work on restoring power, said BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy.
She said BGE restored power late Thursday to the last of its 1,200 customers who were without electrical service, mostly in Carroll County.
Only about 16 BGE-supplied households in Carroll County were without power yesterday - but not as a result of the storm.
"We're in the clear," Foy said. "The one difficulty we had in Carroll over other areas is that in many cases we had entire trees falling down on wires. It took time to get the debris off the road and because of the icy roads it took a little bit more time to get there."