More than 284K Peco customers still without power

Last updated: Friday, February 7, 2014, 6:16 AM

More than 284,000 Peco customers remain without power this morning, two days after a storm slammed the Philadelphia region.

Fallen trees and branches knocked down power lines and disrupted traffic during the Wednesday storm, particularly in Bucks, Chester and Montgomery counties. Peco has warned that fully restoring electricity would take multiple days.

As of about 6:15 a.m. today, 284,061 Peco customers continued to lack power. Chester remained the hardest-hit county, with more than 96,000 homes and businesses without power. That was followed by more than 85,000 outages in Bucks, 70,000 in Montgomery, 25,000 in Delaware and 5,000 in Philadelphia.

In total, 715,000 Peco customers lost power during the storm, the utility's worst-ever winter outage incident and second only to Superstorm Sandy for the most outages during any one event.

President Obama has signed a disaster declaration for the area, making the region eligible for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The storm caused major disruptions for motorists and public transit. SEPTA's Paoli-Thorndale Regional Rail line, which had suspended service since Wednesday morning, began running again just this morning.

Another round of snow is likely to make its way to the region over the weekend.

Contact Emily Babay at 215-854-2153 or ebabay@philly.com. Follow @emilybabay on Twitter.

Contact the Breaking News Desk at 215-854-2443 or BreakingNewsDesk@philly.com. Follow @phillynews on Twitter.