HENRICO COUNTY Va., -- Nearly five days after a severe storm knocked out power to more than 200,000 Dominion Virginia Power customers in Central Virginia, power crews continued to work to restore electricity to the handful of households that remained in the dark.
Neighborhoods off Brook Road and Hermitage Avenue were the hardest hit areas.
As of Tuesday afternoon, an online outage map showed more than 200 homes and businesses were without power in Henrico. The utility company reported less than 100 customers did not have electricity in Richmond.
Emmett Thomas, a veteran who lives on Fayette Avenue, once again woke up without power Tuesday morning.
His home was surrounded by several downed power lines and homes with roofs covered with tarps.
"I'm just fortunate enough that my house is still standing," Thomas said, "I'm just lucky."
A Dominion Power spokesperson said 500 crews responded to over 4,000 separate locations that lost power over the weekend.
She described the storm as a "catastrophic event" that was given a similar response as if a hurricane hit the area.
"There will be some homes that we will not be able to restore today until the customer makes repairs to safely allow us to energize their homes. We encourage these customers to work with licensed professionals and the county to complete this work," Dominion spokeswoman Le-Ha Anderson said. "While electric service has been restored, crews have an incredible amount of clean up ahead of them. Temporary repairs will need to be made permanent."
Dominion trucked in crews from Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina.
After meteorologists predicted strong storms to hit the area Tuesday afternoon, Dominion Power said they were ready with crews on stand-by if outages became a problem.
Thomas said his power was restored a few hours after our interview.