More than 760,000 Con Ed customers in NYC still without power

New York power company Consolidated Edison Inc said Wednesday it had restored power to over 160,000 of the 930,000 total customers knocked out by Hurricane Sandy, leaving about 764,000 still without power.

Sandy hit the U.S. East Coast Monday night and left almost 8.5 million homes and businesses without power in 21 states from North Carolina to Maine and as far west as Illinois, which surpassed the 8.4 million customers left in the dark by Hurricane Irene last year.

Sandy knocked out power to about 30 percent of Con Edison's more than three million power customers in New York City and Westchester County.

Con Edison said Sandy was the largest storm-related outage in its history. The previous record was the more than 200,000 customers affected by Hurricane Irene in 2011.

On Tuesday, Con Edison estimated that customers in Brooklyn and Manhattan served by underground electric equipment should have power back within four days.

Restoration to all customers in other areas served by overhead power lines will take at least a week.

Last night, the company said it had to cut power to about 160,000 customers in southern Brooklyn and central Staten Island due to Sandy-related problems on high-voltage systems supplying electricity to those areas.

The company also said it reduced voltage to several neighborhoods in Brooklyn by 8 percent last night as workers address the problem.

Officials at Con Edison were not immediately available to say where most of the outages were Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, the company said about 250,000 customers in Manhattan, 180,000 in Westchester County, 108,000 in Queens, 109,000 in Staten Island, 87,000 in Brooklyn, and 45,000 in the Bronx were without power. (Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by James Dalgleish)