5th UPDATE: More Than 1 Million Customers Lose Power In Virginia, Carolinas, Mid-Atlantic

Hurricane Irene so far has left well over a million utility customers without power in North Carolina, Virginia and the mid-Atlantic, as high winds keep line crews from restoring power services, the region's largest utilities said Saturday.

Dominion Resources Inc. (D) reported Saturday evening that 842,000 of its customers had lost power, with Richmond and southeastern Virginia the hardest hit, and a smaller portion of outages in North Carolina.

"We've been hit hard and it's not over," Dominion spokesman David Botkins said late Saturday, as the storm hovered over Virginia.

Crews have been able to restore electricity service in "some pockets" of Dominion's service territory, but most of the work had to wait until high-speed winds blew over.

Progress Energy Inc. (PGN) said fewer than 235,000 customers were without power in coastal North Carolina, Raleigh and some parts of South Carolina as the massive storm swept through the region.

As the storm has reached north, it has been accompanied by power outages for 150,000 or more utility customers in Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey, with many more outages expected.

Constellation Energy Group Inc.'s (CEG) Baltimore Gas & Electric utility reported more than 55,000 customers had lost power. About 35,000 customers of Pepco Holdings Inc.'s (POM) Delmarva utility in Delaware and Maryland lost power. The company's Atlantic City utility reported 31,000 customers were in the dark and its Washington utility reported more than 26,000 customers had lost electricity. More outages are expected as the storm moves north, Pepco spokeswoman Bridget Shelton said late Saturday.

"This is the front end of Irene," Shelton said.

Progress has been able to restore power to several thousand customers in South Carolina and southern North Carolina as the storm has moved north, said Progress spokeswoman Jessica Lambert.

In Virginia and North Carolina, high winds kept line workers from starting to assess the damage from Irene and make repairs to restore power.

Progress won't send crews to restore power unless winds are blowing less than 39 miles an hour, Lambert said.

Customers in the hardest hit areas could be without power for days, as the utility works to repair damage from flooding and restore transmission lines that were disabled during the storm, Lambert said.

Utility crews in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions such as Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PEG) and Consolidated Edison Inc. (ED) were preparing as Hurricane Irene was moving up the coast as a Category 1 storm carrying maximum sustained winds of 85 miles per hour. ConEd said it is considering shutting off power in all low-lying areas of New York City as a precaution against storm surges.

Neither Progress nor Dominion reported any damage to power plants from the storm, though both said there had been some outages along high-voltage transmission lines.

The number of outages is likely to grow as Hurricane Irene moves up the East Coast.

Dominion and Progress have brought in thousands of workers and equipment from utilities in other states to help their crews restore power once wind speeds slow.

-By Cassandra Sweet, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-269-4446; cassandra.sweet@dowjones.com

--Mark Peters contributed to this article

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