CONCORD, N.C. - An armada of cherry picker trucks lined up and moved out Friday at Lowes Motor Speedway, a staging area in the race to restore power to nearly 1.8 million people in the ice-coated Carolinas.

Repair workers who have poured in from across the South were working against the clock and the ice, which continued to send tree limbs crashing onto power lines, some of which had already been repaired once.

Frustrated utilities pushed back earlier promises and acknowledged most customers won't have power back until next Wednesday night, exactly a week after a the ice storm began blowing through.

"The tree limbs are still falling and getting tangled up in our power lines," said Mike McCracken, a spokesman for Carolina Power & Light. "We've made ground in some areas, but in other locations, we've lost ground."

Ten thousand utility workers were working in the Carolinas, which took the brunt of the mid-week storm that coated everything with in a heavy glaze. Forests and yards popped with the sound of crashing branches, roofs and cars were crushed and streets were littered with debris and downed lines.

"We come up here, work a little overtime, help the folks get the lights back on before Christmas," said Bobby Brinkman of Sarasota, Fla.-based Pike Electric.

Raleigh-area CP&L;'s outages increased to 411,000 from 350,000 a day earlier. Charlotte-based Duke Power also lost ground, as 993,000 North Carolina customers were without electricity Friday, compared to 930,000 earlier. Nearly 290,000 were powerless in South Carolina, up from 276,000. North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives reported 105,000 outages.

Friday's temperatures temporarily climbed into the 40s, melting some of the ice.

At least 26 deaths had been blamed on the storm since it blew across the Southern Plains earlier in the week, sending snow and ice from New Mexico to New York. They include a Virginia woman who froze to death after her car slid off the road and a North Carolina man whose car was hit by a falling tree as he returned from delivering blood supplies.

In New York, noted jazz saxophonist Robert Berg, 51, was killed Thursday when a cement truck collided with his SUV on a snow-slickened Long Island road. Berg had toured with Miles Davis in the 1980s and recorded solo albums.

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, who with South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges declared states of emergency, said he was worried too many people were choosing to ride out the cold. Only 1,600 people stayed in 56 of the state's shelters Thursday night, and forecasters predicted a low of 17 on Friday night.

Easley activated the National Guard to help residents in areas where electricity wasn't expected to be restored for several days or more.

Guard members will go door-to-door to make sure people are safe and have information about local emergency shelters, he said.

Jean Voss hung yards of felt to isolate her living room in Wake Forest, north of Raleigh, and spent Thursday night huddled with her elderly parents under a pile of blankets in front of a set of gas logs.

"My mother likes to defy God," Voss said when asked Friday morning why they hadn't gone somewhere else. "`If God's on my side, I'm going to be fine.'"