Five percent of American Electric Power customers in Lawrence County remain in the dark Friday morning after a short but vicious wind storm knocked down trees and power lines Wednesday night.

That is less than 1,500 customers compared to Thursday morning when 30 percent of those who depend on AEP for electricity were without power. That included Chesapeake Elementary and Fairland East Elementary schools that had to shut down all day Thursday.

Power was restored to the Chesapeake school around 2:30 Thursday afternoon, according to Dr. Scott Howard, school superintendent.

AEP expects all the power to be back on to county customers by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

At the peak of outages, Buckeye Rural Electric had only 34 of its 5,943 customer without power. That is now down to 27 with restoration expected today.