Power expected to be restored to Pittsburgh-area homes faster than after April 2025 storms, Duquesne Light says

Duquesne Light is working to restore power after Friday's storms left 163,000 of its customers without power.

Already, more than 100,000 customers have had their power restored, bringing the total number of outages to 41,000 as of 11 p.m. Saturday. 

A Duquesne Light spokesperson told KDKA-TV that the changes they've made since last April's storm should allow them to restore power more quickly.

Mutual assistance crews from across the country, ready to help restore power after what DLC officials said was one of the most significant events in their history.

"Yeah, we've got all hands on deck," said Matt Neistein, director of communications and brand for DLC. "It's widespread damage. It's really serious for us. This is the worst we've seen since last April."

At its peak, April's storm left 325,000 DLC customers without power, with some losing power for over a week. 

Duquesne Light has historically brought in at most 200 mutual aid trucks. For that April, they brought in 600 trucks. 

Even though Friday's storm had half as many peak outages as April's storm, DLC still has at least 500 mutual aid trucks coming in Saturday, on top of ones here from Canada.

"I think that's one of the things that we took away from last year's storm was if we need help, we're going to call help," Neistein said. "We're going to call them in as quickly as we can, and we're going to call in as many of them as we can."

Duquesne Light's operations director admitted to county lawmakers after April's storm that they faced an internal bottleneck, struggling to handle the increased number of mutual aid trucks. DLC can now handle up to 2,000 mutual aid trucks, Neitsein said.

"We're hoping to have them and use them more effectively than we did last time," he said. 

The question on the minds of those still without power is when their power will be restored. Neistein said they have wanted to provide those estimates more consistently.

"We don't have an estimated time of restoration yet. We're still doing damage assessment," Neistein said. "The winds really didn't stop blowing until early this morning, and that took us some time to go out and see what the lay of the land is like and what's going to take to fix everything."

They hope to issue an estimated restoration time on Sunday, he said. Helping them complete those damage assessments faster is a new tech upgrade they have deployed across all grades.

'We're positive that we're going to get things moving a little bit faster, maybe, than people were expecting, and we're happy that we're going to be able to do that now," Neistein said. 

Duquesne Light is partnering with Giant Eagle to provide free ice and water to those without power. It runs through Monday.