(June 13, 2009 - 7:00 p.m.) - MLGW crews have made significant progress today in restoring power to customers affected by last night's storm. The current number of customers without power is down to about 75,000, meaning that MLGW has restored power to about 55,000 customers in the past 24 hours.

MLGW crews are working 16-hour shifts in an effort to restore power. A total of 25 crews have arrived from Nashville and Chattanooga, and three more are on their way. A total of 48 tree trimming crews have arrived in town, as well, and 13 more are on their way.

Damage from trees has been the biggest culprit. We have not seen a large amount of downed poles in comparison to what we saw in 2003, but the trees have downed a tremendous amount of lines.

Today we have been focusing on repairs to MLGW substations and repairs to circuits. We focus on circuits that serve critical facilities first, and then those circuits that represent the largest number of customers. From circuits, we can work our way down to the smaller outages involving fuses, transformers and individual customer outages.

MLGW has continued to update the media on our progress and we have been continually providing Twitter updates at www.twitter.com/mlgw.