The power outages that lingered for a number of Harford County homes and businesses all last week and into the weekend are no more, as BGE announced it had finished restoring all power outages related to Hurricane Irene by Sunday night.
Harford suffered about 78,000 outages as a result of the storm. BGE has 101,000 customers in the county, and 1.2 million system-wide.
"Every outage is counted, so a customer who experienced two outages during the storm would be counted twice," BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. "In other words, the [78,000] outages didn't necessary affect [78,000] different customers. It would include multiple outages affecting the same customer as well."
BGE still had about 2,500 Harford customers without power Friday morning, but the company reduced that number to just under 1,000 by Friday evening. The remaining outages were eliminated over the weekend, according to the company.
Scattered pockets without power were still visible on BGE's website Tuesday, however, especially as heavy rain and the threat of flash floods moved into the area Monday evening.
BGE had restored power to an additional 1,822 Harford customers since Monday, according to the outage report on its website. As of Tuesday afternoon, 168 BGE Harford customers did not have power.
In Cecil County, about 3,100 Delmarva Power customers lost power briefly Tuesday afternoon because of a burnt cap in a transformer, spokeswoman Bridget Shelton said.
Those outages struck at 1:06 p.m. and were fixed by about 2:18 p.m., Shelton said.
Perryville High School was dismissed at 2:15 p.m. because of the outage.
Over the period from Aug. 27-29, during Irene and the day after, most of Delmarva's 5,100 customers in northern Harford had lost power at some point, Shelton said last week. All were restored by Aug. 30.
Downed trees a major issue
Hurricane Irene closed nearly 120 Harford County roads at its peak, highways maintenance chief Kenny Gemmill said Tuesday.
One major local headache was Reckord Road in Fallston, which was closed from Aug. 28 to 31 because of two trees that had fallen on Verizon, Comcast and BGE wires.
Gemmill said the county got many complaints about the tree but could not do much because it had to wait for the utility crews to arrive.
"Every road that was closed was due to a tree on electric wire or wires, that we are not allowed to touch until the utility company gets there," he said.
Two county roads were still closed at the end of last week, one of them into this week.
Stafford Road, in the Darlington area, was only reopened Tuesday. It had downed utility lines but no trees blocking the road, Gemmill said.
Virginia Avenue, near Bel Air, was closed until Saturday. It had low-hanging Verizon lines, he said.
Unlike BGE, Verizon and Comcast did not provide local estimates of the number of customers who lost cable television, Internet or landline phone service as a result of the storm.