More than 115,000 customers were without electricity at various times throughout the day, according to electric utilities supplying most of the power to Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester, Horry and Georgetown counties. The East Cooper region and Horry and Georgetown counties were among the areas hardest hit.

Utility crews planned to work throughout the night removing fallen trees and limbs from the lines and restoring power. Much of the electricity was expected to be restored by this morning, but utility officials cautioned that customers in outlying areas would likely have the longest wait and that thousands might still be in the dark today.

Most of the Lowcountry outages Saturday were concentrated in Charleston County. Dorchester and Colleton counties reported virtually no outages, while Berkeley County had scattered losses of power near St. Stephen.

South Carolina Electric and Gas spokesman Robin Montgomery said the first priority is to repair circuits powering the largest number of homes and businesses.

"You try to bring on as many as you can at one time," Montgomery said. "Then you work your way out to the point where you are working on individual customers. That's when the process slows down a little. Hopefully, we will have all our customers back online by the end of (today)."

SCE&G serves about 577,000 customers in South Carolina. State-owned Santee Cooper, the coast's other major power provider, has about 141,000 retail customers. Together, the two utilities accounted for nearly 100,000 of the outages related to Hurricane Charley.

By 2 p.m. Saturday, SCE&G had restored power to more than half of its affected customers from a high of 32,000 earlier in the day. At 11 p.m., only about 2,000 customers were still without power, mostly in Mount Pleasant, Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island.

Santee Cooper's outages grew as the storm moved north through the company's service areas in Horry and Georgetown counties, company spokesman Willard Strong said.

At about 2:30 p.m., approximately 65,000 Santee Cooper customers in those counties had no power. By 4 p.m., that number had been cut to about 32,000.

Smaller electric co-ops, many of which buy power from Santee Cooper, also reported outages. About 15,000 customers of Horry County Electric Cooperative were without power around 2 p.m. Saturday, according to Horry County officials.

Berkeley Electric Cooperative, which has about 66,000 customers in the Lowcountry, still had about 1,100 customers without power around 11 p.m. Saturday.

SCE&G had some 900 workers and contractors working to restore power along the coast, Montgomery said. Santee Cooper also had "hundreds" on duty over the weekend, Strong said.

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