Some 820,000 Texas customers still without power

A dog stands guard at a home, damaged by a fallen tree, in the Heights historic district neighborhood near downtown Houston September 15, 2008.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Some 820,000 customers in Texas remained without power on Monday, nine days after Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast before cutting a destructive path all the way to New York.

CenterPoint Energy Inc, the power company for most of the Houston area, still had about 767,000 customers in Texas without power early Monday, down from 2.15 million at the height of the storm.

CenterPoint predicted its team of 11,000 restoration workers would return power to most of the Houston area by Thursday. The company could not estimate when it will return service to homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast, including Galveston where the storm made landfall early on September 13.

Entergy Corp, the other hard-hit power provider in Texas, said 52,000 customers were still without power in eastern Texas, down from the 392,000 affected.

Entergy now says that it will have all of its Texas customers restored to electrical service by October 6, earlier by as much as 12 days for some customers.

CenterPoint and Entergy Texas said Ike knocked out service to about 99 percent of their Texas customers.

Ike hit the Galveston-Houston area as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph (177 kph). Overall, the storm cut power to more than 7.7 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia as it marched from Texas to the Northeast from September 12-19.

CenterPoint, of Houston, transmits and distributes electricity to more than 2.1 million customers in Texas and natural gas to more than 3 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Entergy, of New Orleans, owns and operates about 30,000 MW of generating capacity, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes power to 2.7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Outside of Texas, the lion's share of customers that lost power had been restored by Monday. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 47,000 in Ohio and 19,000 in Kentucky were still without power.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino and Bernie Woodall; Editing by Marguerita Choy)