About 185,000 homes and businesses remain without power in Northern Ireland following Storm Eowyn.
Strong winds battered the region from the early hours of Friday while the public were urged to stay at home amid a top-level red weather warning.
Homes and buildings were damaged and scores of roads were blocked by fallen trees during the strong winds, while a yellow warning for wind has been issued for Sunday.
On Saturday, NIE Networks said at 11am approximately 185,000 properties remained without power.
They said they hope to restore power to the vast majority of homes and businesses over the coming days.
But they warned the scale of the damage means it could take up to 10 days before all customers have power restored, and both weather conditions, and the ability to access locations, will continue to be challenging this weekend.
Derek Hynes, managing director of NIE Networks, said they believe there are more than 4,000 locations where the network has been damaged by the wind or fallen trees.
“Storm Eowyn has caused devastating levels of damage to the electricity network in Northern Ireland,” he said.
“Almost one third of the people here have no power. At this early stage, we believe that there are well over 4,000 locations in Northern Ireland where our network has been damaged by the wind or falling trees. Each of these locations will need to be visited.
“Right now, we are prioritising faults which affect the largest numbers of homes and businesses. It is likely that it will take us up to 10 days to get to the final locations and restore power to those residents.
“We continue to work with Government and other agencies to try to provide information to the most vulnerable in our society as we work through a long restoration effort.”
He added: “At this stage, we have been able to restore power to more than 96,000 families and will work over the weekend to assess the scale of the damage, and to update estimated restoration times on our website.
“We will keep going until everyone has their power back.”
He asked that people do not approach any electricity equipment and be extra careful around fallen trees as they often take electricity poles and wires with them as they fall.
On Friday, PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Davy Beck said it will take days to assess the full impact of the “severe” storm.
“We’re only now starting to see the number of calls start to rise in respect of impacts, concerns for safety, and indeed, more and more reports in respect of roads blocked and issues as a consequence of that,” he said.
“So, I think it’s going to be a number of days before we can fully understand the full impacts of this storm but certainly this was a severe storm.”
