For those in dark, it's wait and wait some more

Forty hours after hundreds of thousands of folks in New Hampshire and Maine lost power, thousands still remain in the dark today and could stay that way as late as Monday, power company officials said today.

In New Hampshire about 110,000 homes were still without power this morning, down from a peak of 207,000 on Wednesday night.

Many of those without power are in Rochester where officials opened the Rochester Middle School on Brock Street to those affected.

PSNH said most residents will have their power restored through the weekend with the last of those affected back online by Monday.

In Maine CMP put more than 600 line and tree workers out on the restoration project, plus hundreds more support personnel, working in the field and in utility offices Friday morning as power restoration efforts continued. As of 9:30 a.m., the company's crews have reduced the number outages to fewer than 25,000.

The storm knocked out power to more than 157,000 homes and businesses with the peak number of outages reaching nearly 104,000 around 8:30 Thursday morning. Nearly 1,000 CMP employees and contractors worked through Thanksgiving Day restoring power to nearly 75,000 homes and business and re-establishing service along most of the company's major distribution lines that serve large concentrations of residential and commercial customers.

Most of those still without power are in York County where this morning around 10 a.m. it was reported 15,000 were still in the dark, including 179 homes in Sanford and 743 in Lebanon.

CMP reported today that most of those still without power will see theirs restored over the weekend, with some as late as Sunday night.

CMP spokeman Gail Rice, however, said a dramatic push was being made to get most customers online by late tonight.

"By late this evening, we expect to have power back to more than 90 percent of the customers initially affected," she said. "We will still have scattered outages into Saturday, but those are expected to affect small groups of customers, especially on seasonal roads, peninsulas, islands, and other hard-to-reach locations."

Here is a list of outages by county:

CMP continues to move more crews into the hardest-hit parts of York, Cumberland, Lincoln, and Sagadahoc Counties. CMP urges customers with questions about restoration progress in their location to call the utility's outage hotline at 1.800.696.1000.