Some 200,000 customers without power in Midwest

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Power companies in Illinois and Indiana by late Tuesday afternoon had reconnected most of those who lost power during the previous day's thunderstorms, but almost 200,000 customers remained without electricity, the utility companies said. About 650,000 power customers were without electricity at some point Tuesday in Illinois and Indiana.

Exelon Corp's Commonwealth Edison unit reported about 147,000 customers were still in the dark, about half of them in the Chicago area. The overall outage figure is down from about 219,000 customers without electricity earlier Tuesday and a total of 545,000 customers affected by the storm.

ComEd, which serves 3.8 million customers in Chicago and northern Illinois, estimated it would take several days to restore power to all customers, said company spokeswoman Alicia Zatkowski.

In Indiana, NiSource Inc's Northern Indiana Public Service Co unit reported about 44,000 customers without power, down from about 63,000 out earlier Tuesday.

In central Illinois, mainly in the Peoria area, Ameren Corp showed about 9,750 customers without power, down from a peak of 28,000 customers early Tuesday, said Leigh Morris, spokesman for Ameren Illinois Utilities, which has about 1.2 million customers

_{Bron: Reuters}