February 14, 2008 -- Zhejiang province will restore its trunk power grid at the end of March, the local power grid company told the state-owned Xinhua newswire. According to the news service, the recent weeks of snow storms have brought down 12,753 pylons, 22 transformer substations, and damaged almost 10,000 meters of transmission lines. As a result of the outages, nearly 9,000 villages and nine cities suffered outages, which affected more than 1.8 million homes in the province.

Restoring power to residents was the first priority, officials told local media. Since Feb. 6, over 30,000 technicians have been at work restoring power. As of Feb. 12, 95 percent of affected homes had power again. "The province is stepping up efforts to restore its 500 kv (kilovolt) trunk power grid," a provincial power grid company spokesman told Xinhua. "However, it is most complicated to repair 500 kv power lines because workers have to erect iron towers weighing many tons in the mountains."