As the fourth consecutive winter storm hit northern California in as many days, Pacific Gas and Electric Company crews working around the clock made huge strides in restoring power to customers, repairing electric equipment throughout northern and central California.

With help of crews from Southern California Edison and dozens of contract crews from as far as Missouri, PG&E reduced outage counts to 26,000 customers without power throughout northern and central California, the majority of whom are in the Humboldt and San Luis Obispo regions, or about 62,000 customers restored in just 24 hours. About 3000 of the utility's customers without power are in the greater Bay Area, largely in the hills of the Peninsula and in the South Bay region, down from 16,300 just the night before.

Since the storms began, PG&E crews have been faced with more than 2500 locations where equipment damage occurred. In total, nearly 500 poles have been damaged or destroyed, 400 transformers damaged, and more than 265 miles of power lines have been knocked down by trees, branches, or fierce winds. In addition to damaged equipment, hundreds of outages have been caused by strong winds slapping power lines together, or tree limbs falling across lines and tripping circuit breakers.

Crews made tremendous progress restoring 7000 customers in the Humboldt region, where fewer than 13,000 customers are without power, many of those since the storms first began. Downed trees, flooding and mudslides have dramatically limited PG&E crews' ability to reach some of the damaged high-voltage transmission lines and distribution lines, resulting in these prolonged outages in that region.

In total since the storms began Friday night, more than 1.5 million of PG&E's 5 million customers have been affected by power outages. [Note: That number is a cumulative total of all outages: it includes customers who have been affected by more than one outage -- in those cases, each time a customer loses power in successive storms, they are counted again.]

Crews will continue power restoration efforts throughout the night. However, in several areas, flooding, mudslides, falling trees and other dangerous conditions are continuing to limit access to damaged equipment. For these reasons, and because of the very large number of outages and damage locations, it is likely that some customers will not have their power restored until Wednesday or even later.