Self-Help Keeps Winter at Bay as Power Fails

Residents and workers at Tender Heart Home Care kept warm Sunday with kerosene and electric heaters run by a generator.

Cold, melting snow and ice hampered efforts to restore power for them and hundreds of thousands of other residents of the Appalachians and Northeast who were hit by two snow and ice storms last week.

At least one death was attributed to the cold. The body of an off-duty Milwaukee police officer was found outside his home Sunday.

Officer Robert G. Olde, 50, apparently collapsed and died of hypothermia, police Capt. Joseph Purpero said.

About 17,600 West Virginia customers of Monongahela Power Co. and Appalachian Power Co. were without electricity Sunday. Most had been without power since Tuesday, when as much as 30 inches of snow snapped tree limbs and power lines.

Most service should be restored by Tuesday or Wednesday, a spokesman for the two utilities said Sunday.

Thousands were still without electricity Sunday in the Northeast, but airports, trains and highways had mostly returned to normal. “Sidewalks are in many cases more of a problem than the streets,” said Anne Canty of the New York City Sanitation Department.

But electricity wasn’t the only problem for the 16 residents at Tender Heart, in South Charleston.

“There was one period where the phones went all dead, the electricity was off, the water was off,” owner Wynona Wolfe told The Charleston Gazette.

About 1,000 electric crews were working 16-hour shifts to reattach downed power lines in the Philadelphia area.

Winds blew at 35 m.p.h. Sunday in parts of northern New Hampshire, making the wind chill 40 degrees below or worse.

Customers still without power Sunday in other states included 27,000 in New Jersey, and 120,000 in the Philadelphia area, down from 557,000, utilities said.