It has been two weeks since Typhoon No. 15 caused widespread blackouts in Chiba Prefecture.
As of 9 a.m. Monday, about 2,600 households were still without power, less than 1 percent of the outage peak when about 641,000 households and businesses in the prefecture were effected.
However, scores of households in areas where power was supposed to have been restored are still without electricity.
The causes of such cases, referred to as "hidden power failures," include damage to service wires between electricity poles and individual buildings.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. has been struggling to grasp the details about the situation and resolve the trouble.
TEPCO said Thursday that power was restored to all parts of the prefectural town of Tako. By Friday, however, the town's municipal government had received 43 inquiries from residents saying their homes were still without electricity.
As of Sunday, there was still no power at the house of a 47-year-old man who lives in a mountainous part of Sanmu in the prefecture despite a TEPCO announcement on Saturday that power had been restored in the area.
"Did they forget to restore power at my house?" asked the man, who had no choice but to use a home generator.
Electricity is transmitted to each household by gradually stepping down the voltage by a transformer installed at a substation or an electricity pole.
TEPCO has announced the return of power in certain areas after finishing restoration work on those areas' damaged high-voltage wires and verifying the electricity flow via a monitoring system.
However, TEPCO cannot find blackouts caused by such problems as damage in low-voltage wires or service wires, because those wires have no monitoring system. TEPCO has been inundated with inquiries from customers complaining about such "hidden power outage" cases.
To fully grasp the situation, TEPCO dispatched its employees to the disaster task forces of each municipal government in the prefecture and discovered that 98 households in the city of Chiba were without power as of 6 a.m. on Sunday.
The company said it is working to restore electricity based on the information sent to the company but cannot keep up with the demand as there are still too many cases to deal with.
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