American Electric Power Co. (AEP.N) reported 130,000 homes and businesses in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia were without electricity at the height of the storm, a number its emergency line crews had whittled down to around 89,000 early Tuesday.

Some of these customers, especially in rural areas, were not likely to see their power restored until Thursday or Friday, company spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said.

AEP, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the nation's biggest utilities, with 5 million customers in 11 states.

Also in Kentucky, LG&E Energy, a unit of Powergen Plc (EONG.DE), said the storm knocked out service to 58,400 customers, with most outages in the Lexington area.

After moving across the Midwest, where the storm, blamed for at least 15 weather related deaths, dropped more than a foot of snow and ice, it swept down to the Carolinas before turning northeast and moving up the East Coast.

In North and South Carolina about 20,000 customers had no electricity for a couple of hours over the weekend.

Dominion Resources' (D.N) utilities Virginia Power and Dominion North Carolina said about 2,900 of its 2.1 million customers were still without power early Tuesday, down from 25,000 when the three-day storm was at its worst.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England, where more than two feet of snow fell in some areas, were spared widespread outages because the snow was light and powdery, putting far less weight on trees and power lines than the icy glazing on lines farther west and south.

Checks with utilities in New York, New Jersey and New England, for example, showed power outages running at about the same number as a normal day.

Meteorologists forecast temperatures across the region would range in the 20s and 30s F this week before rinsing into the mid-40s by the middle of the week. (Additional reporting by Eileen Moustakis, New York, and Leonard Anderson, San Francisco).