Towns all over central New Jersey continue to clean up after the remnants of Hurricane Sandy blew trees and power lines into the streets causing major outages.

Damage in the Ramtown section of Howell
Damage in the Ramtown section of Howell (Chris Swendeman, Townsquare Media NJ)
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The state's largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, says it has restored power to 30 percent of its 1.4 million customers who lost service. Still, 900,000 PSE&G customers are without electricity.

Jersey Central Power & Light is reporting outages for 962,079 customers, mainly in Monmouth and Ocean counties as of 12:00noon on its outage map.

Atlantic City Electric says 129, 572 homes and businesses remain in the dark as of 12noon  on its outage map

Orange & Rockland Electric is reporting 53,822 customers without service.

PSE+G says that "unprecented" flooding at substations along the Passaic, Raritan and Hudson rivers causing the utility to take them offline until the flood waters recede, disrupting service to customers in Hudson, Essex and Middlesex counties. The equipment inside the substation will also need to dry and be replaced if necessary.

They have also

PSE&G has put together a "virtual army" of over 1,550 technicians -- 600 PSE&G workers and 950 workers from across the country -- plus an additional 600 contractors to cut and remove trees. PSE&G is beginning to dispatch crews this morning now that the high winds have started to subside. In a number of areas, restoration work may be delayed until flood waters recede.

Colorado power company crews and trucks are heading East to help with recovery efforts from Hurricane Sandy.

Xcel crews are leaving Wednesday for Charleston, W. Va., to help American Electric Power restore power.

The company is sending 22 vehicles and 38 employees, including 29 linemen, from Colorado.

" All the major roads have something knocked down on them"

One Lawrence resident couldn't believe what he saw. "It looks pretty bad. It looks like the wind really did most of the damage. All the major roads have something knocked down on them where trees hit poles, knocked into wires."

One woman standing neary said, "You come out and you see the devastation. The lines are down and the trees and down but everybody seems to be okay and that's the most important thing of all."

Her friend added, "I've never seen this kind of damage. I worry about people's safety. That's what I worry about."

A Princeton resident who was checking out the damage said, "There's been trees down in the past but I think this is as severe as it's been. It's kind of sad. It's scary and it's devastating. The destruction is really bad."

In Ewing one youngster said, "There's a lot of damage and I wasn't expecting this. I'm not exactly scared cause it already happened but if I was right by it when it happened I think I'd be  scared."

A woman standing nearby said, "I thought Irene was bad. We were without power for a week then but I think it's going to be much longer this time. It's much worse than Irene, 10 times worse than Irene. The trees down, the wires down, the destruction. It's amazing, very scary that Mother Nature could be like this. We have no control over it."

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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