"More than 1 million homes and businesses in a swath from Indiana to Virginia remained without power on Wednesday, five days after deadly storms tore through the region."

"The outage meant no July 4 Independence Day holiday for thousands of utility workers who scrambled to restore lingering power outages.

Much of the damage to the power grid was blamed on last weekend's rare 'derecho,' a big, powerful and long-lasting wind storm that blew from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean.

Violent weekend storms and days of record heat have killed at least 23 people in the United States since Friday. Some died when trees fell on their homes and cars, and heat stroke killed others."

Ian Simpson and Jim Wolf report for Reuters July 5, 2012. [2]