Line crews completed work Friday morning (11/1) to restore service to PPL Electric Utilities customers in north central Pennsylvania after a freak early-season snowstorm.

Counting workers from across PPL Electric Utilities’ 29-county service area, crews from three other regional utilities who provided support, tree trimming services and other contracted labor, nearly 600 people were involved in the restoration effort.

This powerful storm Tuesday night and Wednesday (10/29 and 10/30) was confined to a relatively small area in the central Susquehanna Valley, but resulted in outages affecting 53,000 customers in Northumberland, Snyder, Union, Montour, Columbia, Lycoming and Clinton counties.

The extensive damage resulted from several inches of heavy, wet snow building up on trees, many of which had not yet lost their leaves. Most of the outages resulted from tree limbs falling onto power lines, causing the lines to break or short circuit.

PPL Electric Utilities moved nearly every available line crew and a contingent of support personnel into central Pennsylvania to work on repairing damage caused by the storm. The company also got help from PECO Energy, Orange and Rockland Utilities, and FirstEnergy Corp.

"We know that power outages are a hardship, and we appreciate the patience and support of our customers in the central Susquehanna Valley," said John F. Sipics, vice president of Asset Management for PPL Electric Utilities. "We also are thankful for the help we received from other companies as we worked under difficult conditions to restore service.

"Knowing the amount of damage the storm caused to our lines and equipment, we made 3,300 calls to customers to keep them apprised of the situation and worked with local and state emergency management agencies and the Red Cross to address the needs of people who were facing extended outages," Sipics said.

Over the last two and a half days, crews completed about 500 separate repair jobs in the area affected by the storm.

Friday morning, crews finished restoring service to the last of customers affected by the storm and completed cleanup work such as removing tree branches lying across wires.