Jul. 24--New Goshen resident Larry Huffman knows firsthand the fury of Tuesday's severe thunderstorms.

A large tree crushed his garage, and strong winds blew out several windows of his home. The wind tore the fiberglass cover off the bed of his son's truck.

At noon Wednesday, Huffman was still without electricity. He has a heart condition and must use a heart monitor, but he can't do it without electricity.

The night of the storm, "I woke up and heard a noise like a roar," said Huffman, who is 60. "I didn't think it was wind. I thought it was a tornado." Tuesday's storms produced wind gusts of 85 mph in Clinton and 70 mph in Terre Haute.

In the absence of electricity, he and his wife were using candles and going to bed early. They may have to throw out a lot of food as well.

"I'll be glad to get the power back," Huffman said as he stood outside his home and watched contractors for Duke Energy work feverishly to restore electricity to this hard-hit community in northwestern Vigo County.

Tuesday's storms snapped a lot of utility polls in New Goshen, said Rick Burger, Duke Energy district manager. "We had to bring semi loads of utility poles."

A lot of manpower was focused in that area Wednesday, and the goal was to have power restored to most of the community by this morning, he said.

As of about 11 a.m. Wednesday, 6,300 customers in the Terre Haute district were still without power and 4,700 in the Clinton district, which includes New Goshen, Burger said.

Duke Energy expects to have 230 lineman working to restore power to Terre Haute and nearby communities. Normally, the base office in Terre Haute has 25 lineman, Burger said.

With that kind of manpower, "We should make a big dent" in the number of customers without power, he said. The extra support includes Duke Energy employees from around the state as well as contractors.

By 8 p.m. Wednesday, Duke Energy reported that the number of customers without power in Terre Haute had been reduced to 2,878, while the number without power in Clinton was 1,066. At the height of Tuesday's storms, the number of customers in Terre Haute without power was 21,000.

Burger said it might be late Thursday or early Friday morning before all customers in the Terre Haute area have power restored.

"The problem with this storm is not so much the number of customers affected, but rather the unusually large number of individual problems," Duke Energy Indiana President Jim Stanley said in a news release. "This makes power restoration slower than normal."

High winds that accompanied the storms caused extensive damage to the power infrastructure, resulting in outages in virtually every Duke Energy district of the state. The hardest hit areas were Clinton, Greencastle and Terre Haute.