Storm leaves 74,000 Lithuanian customers without power

About 74,000 electricity customers in Lithuania remained without power on Wednesday morning after Saturday’s storm, LRT reported, citing the state-owned electricity distribution operator ESO.

ESO spokesperson Rasa Juodkienė said electricity had been restored to more than 60 percent of affected customers.

Power supplies have been fully restored in the cities of Klaipėda and Šiauliai, while the Utena and Kaunas regions remain the hardest hit, Juodkienė said.

ESO chief Renaldas Radvila said on Monday that restoring power to the last customers in the worst-affected districts of Utena, Kaunas, Vilnius and Panevėžys could take until August 29.

According to ESO, the number of outages peaked on Saturday evening, when 268,000 customers were without electricity. Radvila said the storm was more than one-third more intense than a storm two years ago, making it harder to remove the damage quickly.