Cleveland Public Power expects to restore power by Thursday, hopes to aid FirstEnergy with outages

CLEVELAND - Cleveland Public Power should have electricity restored to all customers by Thursday, the city of Cleveland said.

On Wednesday, Cleveland Public Power met with The Illuminating Company to discuss mutual aid. Once power is back on to CPP customers, crews will begin helping FirstEnergy’s efforts.

[Red Cross and city-operated warming centers and shelters 5.wews.com/eVoua ]

FirstEnergy has 650 linemen working in the area, with more than 100 focused just on restoration to Cleveland residents, the city said. More crews are headed our way from Colorado, Idaho and Montana.

During superstorm Sandy, more than 71,000 lost power in the city of Cleveland. The city said since then, 45,000 are no longer in the dark.

The city said power will be restored to 9,000 by midnight Wednesday, 8,000 on Thursday and Friday and the final 9,500 by Sunday morning.

[FirstEnergy Storm Center outage map: http://bitly.com/HPChLP ]

FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin said lineman are working as quickly as possible to get big chunks of customers back online.

“Probably, it’s going to end up that those locations where we just have one or two customers out, that’s going to take a while. But again, when you have potentially thousands of different locations where we have to go and made a repair, that’s why it takes time to do that,” Durbin said.

FirstEnergy said it has restored power to more than 820,000 of the 2.2 million customers who lost electricity in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland during superstorm Sandy.