Michigan and Maine power outages on Christmas Day

More than 200,000 homes and businesses remained without electric power for a fourth day in parts of Michigan and Maine.

Utility crews worked through the Christmas Day to try to restore electricity cut off by a severe ice storm Sunday.

The worst affected state was Michigan, with about 158,000 customers remained without power at 2 p.m. ET on Christmas Day, utilities companies said.

More than 59,000 customers in Maine continue to lack power. Crews were putting the final patches on power lines in Vermont and New York state, where outages were in the thousands earlier this week.

With temperatures far below freezing, ice on power lines was refusing to budge after the severe weekend weather.

Most of the hotels and motels around Flint, Michigan, had no vacancies Tuesday night as families poured in from hard-hit towns to be somewhere warm for the holiday.

In Maine, emergency officials across the state said the ice storm had created the worst conditions since the Great Ice Storm of January 1998, which left some parts of New England without power for months.

In Waldo County, more than 30,000 customers were without power Tuesday night — equivalent to about three-quarters of the county’s entire population.

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