A week after tornadoes swept down in North Alabama and East Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority said today that about 70,000 homes and businesses are still without electric service in TVA's 7-state region.

In an update this morning, TVA said most of the remaining outages are in North Alabama and the Chattanooga area. EPB, the TVA distributor in Chattanooga, said today about 7,500 homes and businesses are still without power.

At the peak, almost 850,000 customers in the Tennessee Valley were without power last week.

Workers from the seven-state TVA service area, plus Florida and Pennsylvania, are working to repair TVA's transmission system. More than 300 poles or steel structures were damaged in the storms, resulting in more than 90 large transmission lines being out of service, including a large portion of the 500-kilovolt and 161-kilovolt lines serving North Alabama and Mississippi.