LIPA: Power outages could last a week

There’s good news and bad news from the Long Island Power Authority on work to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of Long Islanders still without electricity thanks to Irene, the hurricane that became a tropical storm just before it hit over the weekend.

First the good news. The authority said it expects to restore 90 percent of all outages by Friday.

The bad news is the other 10 percent may be powerless until next weekend or longer.

At Irene’s peak, over a half million LIPA customers were without power. By Monday that number dropped to just under 370,000.

The company is facing its biggest cleanup since Hurricane Gloria struck the island in 1985.

As of Monday only 53 of Shelter Island’s 3,075 LIPA customers remained without power.