WASHINGTON - Pepco continues to make significant progress restoring power to customers who lost service in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Of the 220,000 customers who lost power, nearly 95 percent-207,000 customers-have been restored.

The company continues to execute its planned restoration strategy, with more than 1,400 line-restoration personnel attacking neighborhood outages to restore the remaining customers without power. Now that most major pieces of electrical equipment have been repaired, crews are focused on restoring smaller pockets of customers.

Extensive damage associated with these localized outages makes repairing the remaining customers especially challenging. Outage numbers will likely fluctuate as weak limbs continue to fall and disrupt service and crews switch main power lines off and on to work on neighborhood equipment.

"We've been working strategically around the clock to get the biggest number of customers back on line as quickly as possible. While we've been able to get the vast majority of affected customers back up in 48 hours, restoring electricity to the remaining customers is our top priority. We are hard at work to tackle these very localized outage cases," said Thomas H. Graham, President, Pepco Region. "During major events, our strategy is to first repair damage to main power lines that serve more than a thousand customers. Once power is restored to that line, service is restored to most customers on that line. Sometimes, however, utilities find that neighborhood damage further down the line is impacting a handful of individual customers. We urge customers to keep calling Pepco at 1-877-PEPCO-62 to make sure their outages continue to be reported. Customers also are encouraged to request a call back from Pepco to verify whether they have power."

Customers' reports are vital to Pepco's restoration efforts because, combined with other customer calls and Pepco's technology, it helps the company precisely identify the remaining locations without power and speeds restoration. Customers are urged to report outages at pepco.com or by calling 1-877-PEPCO-62 (1-877-737-2662).

As restoration work progresses, customers may receive more targeted estimated times of restoration (ETR). Any change in ETRs should reflect an improvement in time.

Pepco expects to restore service to all of its customers impacted by the hurricane by Thursday evening. However, most of the remaining customers without power will have their service restored before that time.

To keep up-to-date, customers are encouraged to visit the Pepco website frequently at www.pepco.com and review the outage map, follow us at www.twitter.com/PepcoConnect and listen to local radio stations for updates.

###

Pepco, a subsidiary of Pepco Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: POM), delivers safe, reliable and affordable electric service to more than 778,000 customers in Maryland and the District of Columbia.