San Diego Gas & Electric officials have said they have completed most of their damage assessments from the devastating Southern California wildfires and now expect to restore service to 97% of impacted customers by this weekend.

Since the wildfires started Oct. 21, service had been restored as of Oct. 27 to 91% of the nearly 80,000 customers who lost power over the past week. Currently, about 6,700 SDG&E customers are without power.

“With all the other hardships our customers are facing as a result of the wildfires, we are doing everything we can to expedite their service restoration – and doing it safely,” said Michael R. Niggli, chief operating officer of SDG&E. “We’re focusing our efforts on more than 30 local communities and, especially, on some of the most seriously impacted areas, such as Ramona, Escondido, Fallbrook, Poway and Rancho Bernardo. We appreciate our customers’ patience.”

More than 1000 SDG&E utility poles and at least 35 miles of overhead electric wire have been damaged in the fires. Assessments are not complete, as some of the local fires are still burning.

SDG&E has 750 employees working on restoration efforts, with assistance from 475 mutual-aid and contract workers.

SDG&E estimates about 2,700 customers spread across seven communities will remain without power beyond Nov. 4.

To reach customers expected to experience outages longer than 48 hours, SDG&E customer service representatives have placed more than 8000 proactive calls and distributed hundreds of door hangers.