A few New Hampshire homes could still be dark on Christmas Day, the president of Public Service of New Hampshire said yesterday. "I would expect isolated cases of customers without power on Christmas," utility president Gary Long said.

The state's largest utility reported 58,000 customers without electricity yesterday evening, down from 322,000 outages at the storm's peak. Utility company reports indicate that more than 440,000 New Hampshire homes and businesses lost power in the ice storm that hit the Northeast late last week.

Utilities reported fewer than 67,000 homes and businesses remained without power yesterday in New Hampshire, as crews from as far as Tennessee, Ohio and Canada continued to repair lines in newly fallen snow. Additional snowstorms are forecast for this weekend.

The state's utilities commission plans to launch an investigation of utility company maintenance and response early next year. Officials will examine the reliability of systems and reactions to the storm, said Thomas Frantz, director of electricity for the Public Utilities Commission.

Utility providers are in line with requirements for tree trimming, the most important way to protect power lines, he said. Frantz stressed that no preventative measures could have stopped some power loss after Friday's ice storm, which he said was unprecedented in the speed and quantity of ice that formed across the state's major population base.

"We live in a heavily forested state," Frantz said. "Ice storms are going to break tree limbs, they're going to break trunks, and they're going to fall on power lines."

PSNH released updated projections yesterday of when it estimates 95 percent of accounts in affected communities will return to service. The majority of towns are projected to see 95 percent of accounts restored by tomorrow, although the utility said it cannot yet predict for some towns when that level of service will be restored.

Last night Unitil was working to restore power to 5,852 customers, the vast majority of them on the Seacoast. The utility expected to restore service by today to the 117 remaining Concord-area customers, most of them Bow residents, and to Seacoast customers by today, although problems with individual service could take longer.

"The only caveat is the storm," said spokeswoman Stephanye Schuyler. "If it gets icy, it makes it more difficult."

The outage's peak saw 15,000 Unitil customers without power in the Concord region and 35,000 without power on the Seacoast.

New Hampshire Electric Cooperative had about 1,900 outages remaining, most of them in Rockingham County. At the height of the outage, 45,000 co-op members were without power.

The co-op said yesterday it expected every customer in Deerfield, Epsom and Northwood to have service restored today. It expected all Allenstown customers to have service restored tomorrow.

National Grid spokesman David Graves said the company expected to restore power to its 385 remaining disconnected customers by this morning. Those customers are in Salem and Pelham. There were initially 24,000 National Grid customers without service in the state.

PSNH had 725 crews working across the state yesterday in an effort that Long said he expects to cost more than $10 million. That cost will be paid in part by insurance and in part by customers over a number of years.

Long said crews and resources would soon be funneled to the hard-hit Monadnock region, where Steve Johnson, director of energy delivery at PSNH, said restoration could easily stretch into next week for some customers. "It will almost look like an army invasion as we take resources to the western part of the state," Long said.

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