CRANSTON, R.I. -- State officials late Tuesday expressed support for National Grid's response to Hurricane Sandy, after an executive for the company confirmed that some 80,000 Rhode Island customers remained without power but that a majority would have the lights back on by the end of the week.
In the first full day of recovery efforts, Tim Horan, the head of National Grid's Rhode Island operations, said some 40,000 customers -- including all the state's hospitals -- had their power restored. He said the utility expects a "majority of customers" will have their electricity restored "by the end of the week."
Horan said the task of repairing damage from Hurricane Sandy would be different than Tropical Storm Irene last year, when some 200,000 of the more than 340,000 who lost power had it restored within the first day.
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He acknowledged there are "millions more" outside of Rhode Island without power. "I'm a realist, but my job is to look after Rhode Islanders," Chafee said.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said the utility has made "pretty good" progress in the first full day after the storm. He agreed with Horan's assessment that the process would be more "painstaking" than it was for restoring power after Irene.
"Obviously we will continue to keep the pressure on, [but] a lot of the damage is not in the major transformers and things like that," Whitehouse said. "A lot of it is going down small roads and figuring out what tree branch knocked out which wire and trying to rebuild it."
U.S. Rep. James Langevin said he believed National Grid was "doing everything humanely possible" to get power restored.
"They know this is a major inconvenience for their customers," he said. "It's hard for people to be patient when they are the ones going through this."
Whitehouse, Langevin and Chafee all said their homes are currently without power.
More: See Rhode Island power outages mapped by town throughout the storm