About 3,100 P.E.I. homes and businesses without power on day 18 after Fiona

The pace of power restoration on P.E.I. slowed over the weekend, as crews worked on more isolated incidents of damage caused by post-tropical storm Fiona.

When Fiona struck on Sept. 24 it knocked out power to all 82,000 Maritime Electric customers. Tuesday eveningthere were still about 3,100 customers waiting for their power to be restored.

The outages are spread all across the Island, small lines and individual outages, including in communities such as Dingwells Mills, Montague and Lewes in the east: and Pleasant Grove, Rocky Point and Cavendish in central P.E.I. The Maritime Electric outage map is not showing any line outages in West Prince.

The utility currently has 267 line crews working, who have come from all across Canada to assist.

Electrical shock accident being investigated

One of the companies helping Maritime Electric had an accident involving one of its line crews Sunday.

The company H-Line says one of its staff received a significant shock while working in Murray River. The worker spent about five hours in hospital and was then released, the company said. The worker is back at work on light duties Tuesday.

The shock was caused by a faulty piece of equipment, H-Line said. The company is conducting an investigation along with Maritime Electric.

The Workers Compensation Board is also investigating. In an email to CBC News, the WCB said the investigation is to determine the cause of the accident and what preventative measures might be put in place. At this point the investigation is in progress and no conclusions have been reached..

Friendly greetings slowing work

Maritime Electric is asking Islanders to please limit contact with crews when they see them working on Island roads.

"They are finding it slowing them down a little bit," said Maritime Electric spokesperson Kim Griffin.

"They're not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. Some of the power line technicians said they'd never been invited to so many Thanksgiving dinners in their life. We're truly touched by the generosity and kindness."

The crews need to focus on the task at hand, Griffin said, so they get the power on as quickly as possible.

On Saturday morning there were about 7,000 outages in the province, and the utility was able to restore about 2,000 of those by Sunday morning, but only 1,500 in the two days following.