PEARL RIVER -- A fierce early evening windstorm ripped through the Orange and Rockland Utilities’ service territory Saturday evening toppling trees, utility poles and power lines and interrupting electric service to 27,000 customers from Alpine, N.J. to Milford, Pa.

O&R crews will be working through the rest of the weekend and into next week to restore electric service to all customers. Preliminary reports showed about 200 individual outages as a result of the storm which was still raging late in the vening.

In Rockland, about 12,000 O&R customers lost power. In Orange, 6,700 customers’ service was interrupted. In Bergen County, 3,121 customers were affected and in Pike County, Pa. the number of customer affected was about 4,300.

The hardest hit areas were Spring Valley, West Nyack, Pearl River and Highland Mills.

O&R already had additional crews on the property because of the forecast of poor weather and more crews on stand-by to come in. All those crews are now on the road, and the company was activating as many company crews and contractors as possible to restore service as quickly as possible.