Almost 50,000 lose power in Northeast, Washington as storm hits

(Reuters) - Almost 50,000 homes and businesses were without power in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region as of mid-afternoon on Friday, with most outages in the Washington, D.C. area, during a blizzard that could drop up to three feet (nearly one meter) of snow in parts of New England.

A spokesman for Washington power company Pepco said a tree had fallen on a major transmission line, affecting four substations and knocking out power to some 50,000 customers at one point, though that number later declined.

"It's not clear if it was related to the storm," the Pepco spokesman, Bob Hainey, said.

"We're gradually bringing the substations back online and hope to have things back to normal by early evening," he said.

Pepco, a unit of U.S. power company Pepco Holdings Inc, reduced the outages to about 38,700 customers by early Friday afternoon.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino and David Sheppard in New York; Editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid, Gunna Dickson and Dale Hudson)