It was a rough week for Central Vermont Public Service Corp.

Snow on Tuesday and wind on Thursday night delivered a one-two punch, creating a total of 88,000 outages. The company said 8,500 remained as of 5 p.m. Friday and that repair efforts were expected to continue through Monday.

"It's been one of the most complicated storms in our history," CVPS spokeswoman Christine Rivers said. "Each event would have been a major event in itself and they came one on top of another."

The Red Cross announced it would run emergency shelters at the Rutland Regional Medical Center and the Windsor Recreation Department.

Rivers compared the week to the 2007 "nor'icane" that knocked out power to 68,000 customers. She said several of the outages from this week's tally will be double-counted as a number of customers had power restored only to lose it again.

CVPS could not say how many customers were double-counted, Rivers said, though roughly 8,000 who lost power in the first round were still out when the second round began. She also said she did not have a good estimate of how much the cleanup was likely to cost.

"It will be in the millions," she said. "It certainly does rank in the top 10 storms."

Andy Nash, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in Burlington, said the highest winds were 58 mph recorded at 3 a.m. at the Rutland airport.

"We don't have records for wind speed, but off the top of my head I can think of wind speeds higher than that," he said. "It's certainly up there."

Nash said the NWS does not have wind speeds for the 2007 storm because the power went out at the monitoring station.

Reports from elsewhere in the state included 40 mph in Burlington, 47 mph in Morrisville, 46 mph in Springfield and an unconfirmed report of 60 mph in Waterbury, according to Nash.

Nash said weather-watchers had worried the storm might have been a repeat of the destruction seen in 2007, but they were getting almost no reports of property damage.

Several factors could account for the difference, Nash said, including the lack of daytime heating and snow cooling the ground, keeping the atmosphere relatively stable rather than pulling the winds closer to the ground.

The 2007 storm was preceded by heavy rains that left the ground saturated and soft, Nash said, whereas the ground now is frozen. Also, he said, the "nor'icane" and subsequent storms have probably knocked down many of the trees that were likely to fall.

"You add all that together and that probably kept it from being as bad," he said.

Elsewhere in the state, Green Mountain Power said at around 5 p.m. that it still had 739 outages remaining.

The company reported that Stamford, Jacksonville, Readsboro and Whitingham still had severe damage and that would likely not be repaired until today. Line workers were also expected to work through the night in White River Junction to get all power restored by this morning.

Work in the Wilmington-Dover area was also expected to continue into this morning.

Wells River had two areas with "significant damage" expected to be repaired Friday night.

Nash said the wind was caused by a low-pressure area currently dropping snow on New York City and Philadelphia. Because Vermont was at the northern edge of the counter-clockwise-rotating system, it brought in warm air from the Atlantic.

The low-pressure area will move north, Nash said, but weaken quickly, likely bringing a light snowfall to the area.

"Compared to the last few days, it's certainly going to be calm," he said.

gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com