ComEd says most should have power restored today

About 99 percent of the victims of power failure from the weekend storms are expected to be back online by mid-day today. The rest should be restored by Tuesday, ComEd said today.

About 12,700 customers remain without power in Chicago and the suburbs.

If you're among those who lost power or remain without power and have spoiled food or other problems related to the lack of electricity, don't expect to be reimbursed from ComEd. The utility said Monday reimbursements are ordinarily provided to victims of power outages due to equipment failure, said ComEd spokeswoman Tabrina Davis, and the problems of this weekend are storm-related.

"If it's because of Mother Nature, it's beyond our control. We cannot reimburse (customers)," she said.

Des Plaines, Mount Prospect and many North and West suburbs were hit hard over the weekend, causing as many as 550,000 customers to be without power due to the storms. Towhey Avenue in Des Plaines had been closed most of that time due to many downed poles that support the electrical network, she said.

About 540 Des Plaines customers are still without power and restoration efforts continue. The city's police, fire, public works, fire corps and Citizens On Patrol remain deployed, the city said in a statement today.

When thousands of customers suddenly lose power, ComEd's priority is to first get the police and fire departments as well as hospitals running. Then, large groups of customers are next in line, and finally smaller groups and individual outages, said Davis.

"It's most difficult to find customers who are out the longest, but we redeploy workers to those areas until everyone is restored," Davis said.