O'Malley: More than 350,000 Still Without Power in Maryland

About 378,000 people were still without power in Maryland as of 9 p.m. Monday, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said in a conference call with the media. Crews were expected to work through the night. 

“A lot of progress was made over the last few hours in Anne Arundel County and Harford County,” O’Malley said, “a little bit in Baltimore County, and also St. Mary’s."

More than 296,000 Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) customers and 28,000 PEPCO customers were still without power, O’Malley said, with the remainder of the outages being handled by Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative.

In the Glen Burnie area, a map on the BGE website showed thousands of customers still without power as of midnight Tuesday.

At around 5 p.m. Monday many area residents said they still were without power in areas including Twin Coves, Old Glen Burnie and parts of Brooklyn Park.

"A whole fridge of food gone ... Temperatures [are] going up, so the house is getting hot, can't take kids and go to [the in-laws because] she doesn't have power either," said Tammy Sunderland about her home in Twin Coves.

Maija Denson, who lives in Old Glen Burnie, said she had been without power since about 1:30 a.m. Saturday and as of 5:30 p.m. still did not have power. Having what she described as an "energetic" 6-year-old son has caused her to come up with interesting ways to keep him occupied.

"To make the best of an unpleasant situation we have turned this experience into a camping-at-home vacation," she said in an email.

An avid camper, Denson said she already had plenty of flashlights, batteries, a propane stove and small tent to set up in the living room.

"During the height of the storm when he was the most afraid the tent helped take his mind off of the scary noises that were going on outside," she said. "He doesn't want to go up into his bedroom yet. In his eyes no power equals a very spooky bedroom, so he has spent the past [two] nights, and probably again tonight since we are still with out power, sleeping at his 'campsite' a.k.a. our living room, with me on the couch next to him."

Denson said she knew that BGE was working hard to get power back to its customers as quickly as possible.

Rachael Lighty, a BGE spokeswoman, said that because the storm-related outages have been so widespread they are broken down only by county.

Lighty said they expect the vast majority of customers to have power by late Friday, with some outages that may continue into Saturday.

"We are working very aggressively and around the clock to restore power as quickly and safely as possible," she told Patch.

As of 11:57 p.m. Monday, there were more than 72,000 BGE customers in Anne Arundel County without power. BGE had restored power to nearly 93,000 customers.

Richard Muth, director of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, said there were still 28 state roads closed due to standing water, debris or downed power lines. Only one shelter remained open in the state, in Calvert County, he said.

O'Malley's optimistic tone in the 9 p.m. conference call was in stark opposition to the call at 4 p.m. when he implied he was not satisfied with the response of power companies. More than 450,000 customers were without power at the time, he said.

O’Malley also sounded pleased when detailing new state legislation that demanded nursing homes have the ability to generate back-up power, keeping those at-risk individuals safe from power outages this time around. He said some dialysis centers in Maryland were without power, a problem that would have to be addressed in the future.

Power companies were asked to treat those dialysis centers as a priority, O’Malley said.

He also said the orginal State of Emergency declaration had been amended to include counties left off the initial list.

“All [counties] affected by the storm were added,” O’Malley said. “The president signed the emergency declaration pre-landfall, that had a number of counties in it, and some were concerned that all of them weren’t in it, but the other ones have been added.”

Historic Annapolis Patch Editor Mary McGuirt contributed to this article.