117K still without power in Chicago, suburbs

CHICAGO (WLS) -- ComEd said it could take crews until the end of the week to restore service to customers who lost power during severe storms.

The storms struck the south suburbs hardest Monday afternoon and evening, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power at the height of the outage. As of Tuesday night at 10 p.m., 117,000 residents remained without power in the Chicago area. ComEd says 110,000 of those are in the south suburbs; 3,800 are in the city of Chicago; 2,500 in the western suburbs and 2,500 in the northern suburbs are still without power.

Officials said they hope to have the power back on for everyone by July 4, meaning several days without service. On Tuesday night, ComEd added that they've mobilized 760 crews and secured additional support from out of state.

Lou Maurizi of Matteson got the last generator at one store.

"I was thinking we had a little mess to clean up. Thank God everybody's OK. The neighborhood pitched in and we're doing the best we can right now," he said.

ComEd Senior Vice President of Government and External Affairs Fidel Marquez Jr. said this is the worst storm damage the utility company has seen since 2011 and it will be days before service is fully restored. ComEd set up three command centers to coordinate the restoration effort.

In Indiana, approximately 55,000 customer remain without power as of 4 p.m. CT. Those residents are predominately located in Elkhart, Lake, LaPorte and Porter counties.