Hundreds of thousands lose power across Philly area as Isaias lashes region

More than 600,000 customers on both sides of the Delaware River lost electrical power during Tuesday’s storm, and customers at the New Jersey Shore and in Philadelphia’s leafy suburbs appear to have absorbed the hardest blows.

Shortly after 9 p.m., around 485,000 were still affected by outages.

”This is going to be a tough one,” said Lauren Ugorji, a spokesperson for Public Service Electric & Gas Co., which reported that more than 133,000 of its customers in South Jersey lost power. “Customers should expect delays.”

Around 115,000 were still without service Tuesday night.

As many as 190,000 of Atlantic City Electric’s 545,000 customers — more than a third — lost power as Tropical Storm Isaias lashed the region with high winds and heavy rain, knocking out about 14 major trunk lines, or high-voltage transmission lines, that serve entire communities and subdivisions.

”We have pretty extensive damage to our local electrical distribution system,” said Frank Tedesco, an ACE spokesman. The utility was still doing damage assessments Tuesday afternoon and could not estimate restoration times, he said.

Nearly 157,000 remained without service after 9 p.m.

Peco, which serves more than 1.6 million customers in Philadelphia and Southeastern Pennsylvania, lost more than 300,000 customers at the storm’s peak, said Steven Singh, vice president of technical services.

» READ MORE: Live updates: The latest on Isaias and its aftermath

The outages were heaviest in Chester and Bucks Counties. Nearly half of Chester County’s 215,000 customers were out of service Tuesday afternoon, as well as about 98,000 Bucks County residents, or 43% of its customers, according to the utility.

By 9 p.m., around 212,000 total customers were without power.

Peco had not completed damage assessment or estimated restoration times. Peco said the Tuesday outages, which grew in number throughout the day, differed from the damage it suffered on June 3, when an unexpected storm — the eighth biggest in company history — knocked out 400,000 customers in just the first hour. The utility was able to restore 90% of customers within 36 hours after the June storm.

Singh said that because forecasters had predicted the path of Isaias several days in advance, the company was able to position workers and equipment to respond to the outage.

PSE&G, the giant New Jersey utility whose territory stretches from Gloucester County to the New York border, reported that about 20% of its 2.3 million customers statewide had lost power. Ugorji said the storm knocked out several transmission lines and substations that serve as local distribution hubs.

» READ MORE: In South Jersey, ‘panic mode’ as tornado came out of Strathmere and tore up Route 9

PSE&G has deployed 2,800 line workers, and put out a call for 1,700 workers from other utilities. About 1,300 of those workers were already in place when the storm hit, said Ugorji.

”We were prepared and mobilized quickly, but this one of the worst storms we’ve had in recent years,” she said.