Hartford - The president of Connecticut Light & Power said Tuesday that most utilities customers who are still without power after the weekend storm should have their electricity restored by Saturday, and everyone's lights should be back on by Sept. 7.

"We expect to get full restoration by Wednesday of next week," said Jeff Butler, also CL&P's chief operating officer.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy placed Butler before the television cameras for a second day during a news conference about the ongoing struggle to restore utility service after Tropical Storm Irene.

The CL&P executive said that since last week his company has more than quadrupled the number of utility crews in the field, going as far as to bring Canadian linemen here to Connecticut on chartered jets.

With 900 two-person crews working around the clock, Butler said he expected that the number of CL&P customers still without power will be down this morning to fewer than 300,000. CL&P said that a peak of 671,000 customers on Sunday were affected by outages.

Come Saturday morning, Butler said he expects there will be fewer than 100,000 customers without power.

"We do appreciate your patience in weathering what we all know is the largest single weather event in Connecticut's history," Butler said.

Malloy today is continuing his statewide tour of Irene damage and is scheduled at 2:30 p.m. to visit the Ledyard Town Hall.

Officials have yet to announce an estimated dollar amount on the storm damage.

The governor said that dozens of towns have requested shipments of food and water from the temporary FEMA site at Rentschler Field in East Hartford. There are 47 communities on the list, including Chester, East Haddam, East Lyme, Groton, Ledyard, Lyme, Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, Stonington, Waterford and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.

Malloy has been touring with FEMA representatives, who are determing if Connecticut suffered enough from Irene to be a considered a post-landfall disaster. Such a declaration could make available millions of dollars in federal assistance.

Richard Serino, deputy administrator of FEMA, told reporters at the news conference in the State Armory that his agency is still doing preliminary assessments.

"It's way too early to speculate because there's a lot of things you can't see until you're actually there looking at the damage," he said.

Malloy said he hopes FEMA will issue a declaration soon. He said he and Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman are "working with and quite frankly putting as much pressure on out-of-state assets, federal assets, as well as our utility assets to get as much work done as humanely possible."

Also present at the news conference was Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal and James Torgerson, chief executive of UIL Holdings, the parent company of United Illuminating. About 158,000 UI customers lost power after Irene, and Torgerson said he hopes to have that number down to 65,000 by today.

Both CL&P and UI have struggled to find and deploy enough utilities crews to restore service. As nearby states deal with their own outages and flooding problems, the demand for crews has exceeded supply.

For help in rounding up workers, the governor and his staff placed calls this week to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, and the staff of Vice President Joseph Biden.

Malloy told reporters that federal officials are now lining up 500 additional crews for New England, although he doesn't know how many of those Connecticut will get.

"I am led to believe it had something to do with our phone calls," he said.

Butler, the CL&P president, said he hopes by Friday to have as many as 1,200 crews racing to restore customers' power.

"It would be fair to say that there has never been this many people working on a power issue in the state of Connecticut's history," Malloy said.

j.reindl@theday.com