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., 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 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.

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.”