FRANKFURT - Some 65,000 Germans were still without electricity for the fourth day on Monday after snow, ice and wind hit transmission lines, with half of them facing another cold night, utility RWE said.
Power cuts in North-Rhine Westphalia had left up to 250,000 without power over the weekend as cables could not cope with the weight of snow and with wind tearing down pylons in Germany's most populated state.
Germany usually prides itself on having one of the world's most reliable power networks, with a large proportion of cables underground.
But meteorologists said the unusual duration of concentrated snowfall and gusty wind had overstretched power lines' capacity.
A spokesman for distribution unit RWE Energy said the 65,000 lived in 50,000 households of which 25,000 should be reconnected to the power grid by Monday evening.
Some 400 technicians worked flat out, reconnecting 130,000 by Sunday, RWE said. Around 600 generators were in service, connecting especially vulnerable care homes and remote farms.
Airports in the western region were back to normal on Monday after 100 flights had been delayed over the weekend and all but two train lines were also back in operation, authorities said.
Private weather forecasters MC Wetter in Berlin said there would be more snowfall through to Wednesday, but far less than in recent days, while western Germany should see temperatures rise to 5 degrees by mid-week compared to around zero on Monday.
"The 50 cm or so of sudden snow seen in North-Rhine Westphalia over the weekend were extraordinary, the sort of thing happening once every 100 years," a spokesman at the company said.
An RWE official said high voltage lines had been damaged by western winds hitting north-to-south running lines laden with wet snow of up to 60 cm diameter.
"That was a very unusual combination," Erich Reichertz, assistant to the RWE Energy board, told Reuters.
Pylons could hold ice on the cables weighing three times more than the expected average but last weekend were required to carry more than five times that weight, he said.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
