Thousands without power for 3rd day

July 3, 2012 (ADDISON, Ill.) (WLS) -- As of Tuesday evening, 23,800 ComEd customers are still without power that was knocked out during Sunday's storms.

Most of those are in the north and northwest suburbs.

ComEd says more than 600 crews are working around the clock to restore service.

Addison is one of literally hundreds of locations that ComEd crew workers are trying to repair because of the storm.

In this case they had to cut down trees and put in a new pole before reconnecting the line.

"In order for us start picking people up out here, we had to get this pole repaired, replaced and put all these lines back up so we could start picking up the outages," said Steve Jackson, lead ComEd crew leader.

This is the result tens of thousands of customers have been waiting for. The Koller family endured more than two days without power before getting it back this evening.

"I had to go to a friend's house, shower, do my uniform, go work. It's exhausting with this heat," said Holly Koller.

They stayed in a hotel room last night mostly so 2-year-old Jayden could sleep in air conditioning, an added expense to the mounting cost of the outage which includes 300 dollars of food they had to throw away.

"The only thing in the fridge now I think is water and ice cubes in the fridge that's it," Brian Koller said. "I lost two days of work because if it, the kids' daycare was closed."

Next door they're also thrilled to have power back, but they say they survived without.

"It was nice seeing like the difference with candles at night, cause I am not really used to that," said Stephanie Diaz. "It was like being in a different century. It was kind of fun."

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local, john garcia

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