BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Tuesday’s wet, heavy snowfall looked picturesque but was causing trouble for local utility companies.
About 13,000 customers in the Lehigh Valley were without power at 11 a.m. as the storm moved away from the region, according to PPL Electric Utilities and Met-Ed — the Lehigh Valley's main power suppliers.
PPL reported more than 2,300 customers without power in Northampton County and more than 3,800 in Lehigh County. The Walnutport area alone had more than 2,000 outages, according to PPL’s outage map.
Met-Ed reported more than 5,000 in the dark in Northampton County and over 2,300 in Lehigh County.
PPL advises their consumers to report outages by calling 800-342-5775; texting “outage” to 898775, or by going to pplelectric.com/outage.
Met-Ed says customers can report outages by calling 888-544-4877.
The power companies had warned of outages and said they would be monitoring conditions as the winter storm headed toward the Lehigh Valley.
The situation was worse in other regions of Pennsylvania. PPL reported more than 31,000 power outages in Schuylkill County; more than 15,000 in Dauphin County; and almost 9,000 in Northumberland County.
As of noon Tuesday, PPL said it had restored service to about 53,600 customers of the 90,000 who lost power in its 29-county service area.
"The expected combination of heavy, wet snow had a significant impact in our service territory, resulting in customer outages," Christine Martin, president of PPL Electric Utilities, said in a news release. "We have all-hands on deck as we respond to this storm and have brought in additional crews from other regions to assist.
"In some significantly impacted regions, travel is still difficult. However, PPL Electric will continue to work around the clock until every customer has been restored."
