About 3,400 homes and businesses in central Arkansas remained without power Monday evening, six days after a powerful Christmas night snowstorm downed utility poles and electrical lines across the state.

Entergy Arkansas Inc .,the state’s largest electrical utility, reported 3,420 were withoutservice early Monday evening, but officials said all but a handful of isolated cases would be restored by today.

Nearly three-fourths of the customers still without electricity are in Little Rock.

About 50 customers of First Electric Cooperative were also waiting for power to return Monday evening, said Rob Roedel, a spokesman for the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.

At its peak, about 265,000 Arkansas customers of En-tergy, Southwestern Power and Electric Co., municipal utilities and the state’s electrical cooperatives lost service.

The storm system, which formed in the southern Plains, pounded Arkansas with freezing rain and up to 15 inches of snow Dec. 25. National Weather Service meteorologists issued a blizzard warning for the northeast corner of the state that night. Three people died in weather-related accidents.

More than 5,000 utility workers from 15 states swarmed into the state to help repair Entergy lines.

“We’ll work through the night and get a majority back on,” Entergy spokesman Julie Munsell said. “The rest will definitely be back on [today],” she said.

She said it may take longer to bring electricity back to some who saw damage to electrical meter boxes or other connections on their homes. She said some homeowners would have to repair their homes first before receiving power.

Tori Moss, a spokesman for First Electric Cooperative, said only a few isolated power disruptions remained for its customers, primarily in Saline County, on Monday evening.

“Our crews are still out there,” she said. “They’re working hard.”

Workers battled rain and drizzle Monday, but they didn’t have to deal with the freezing rain that forecasters had originally expected. Only hilly spots in western Arkansas were affected.

“We saw cold rain, but there was no freezing precipitation other than in the elevated terrains,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Matthew Clay.

He said there was a slight chance of light snow late Monday evening and into today in the state’s northern counties if the precipitation lingered. But the system should move out later today, and skies could clear by this evening, Clay said.

Despite the clearing, utility customers may still see brief power disruptions as limbs weakened by last week’s storm fall on lines.

Entergy crews cut limbsalong 1,394 spans of power lines last week, Munsell said. They also repaired 1,901 downed spans of line and replaced 385 poles toppled by heavy ice and snow, and strong winds associated with the storm.

Munsell said damage from last week’s storm was comparable to that of two ice storms that hit the state in 2000.

Cable television repairmen also dealt with the elements.

Mary Beth Halprin, vice president of public relationsfor Comcast Cable, said workers have restored cable television service to a “large majority” of its service area, but she did not have the number of customers still without television service.

“Commercial electrical service is the first priority,” she said. “[Utility] crews repair downed lines and clear trees and limbs. When they deem the area safe, then we go in and work.”

She said cable repair workers often have to wait forutility companies to replace downed poles before they can attach new cable lines.

“We equated these outages to those seen in tornadoes,” Halprin said “You could just see where all the damage is. It was like a path.”

At Entergy, Munsell credited social media and the Internet for helping restoration efforts.

The utility company also implemented a text-messaging system that lets customers know when their power is back on - last week’s storm was the first time the system was used during such a widespread disruption.

She said the instant information provided by the service, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other social media, helped alleviate frustrations from customers who wondered when their power would return.

“In the past, we’d have basic information on our website’s ‘view outages’ page about why the power was out,” she said. “Now, we can provide specific information about where the problems are while the storm is still going on.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/01/2013