Belco hope only 2,000 homes will be without power this morning with both St. George's and St. David's fully restored.

Early yesterday 2,800 out of 25,000 domestic customers were still without power, but they were hoping to get that number down by 800 by the end of the day, said spokeswoman Linda Smith.

"We started the day with 2,800 (yesterday) still without power, and hope to get that down to 2,000 through tonight," she said.

We are also beginning to move into a phase where most of the larger widespread outages have been addressed in the central parishes, and have reassembled teams to go into areas and concentrate on the small outages."

"As has been our programme so far, today is an aggressive schedule, and we will try to accomplish as much as we can on it. However, it is important to note that as we address the small outages, these repairs can often take several hours to rectify and often with little return in terms of numbers of restorations.

"As we complete larger jobs throughout the Island we will then roll out the phase that concentrates on small pockets of outages.

"The teams we are assembling will be able to address a wide range of issues within the areas they are working so that repairs can take place simultaneously."

Added Ms Smith: "We are now at a critical stage of the restoration process as much of the system is energised or "live" and safety is an issue.

"As we have advised before, for safety reasons, customers using generators should not connect to the Belco side of the supply, doing so not only puts our restoration staff at risk but also could lead to damage of a customers generator when power is restored.

"We are asking customers to ensure that they are either connected to the customer side of the supply or connect appliances directly to the generator."