Close to 3 million customers were without electricity Saturday in Houston and East Texas, the power companies for those areas report. The power could stay off in some of those areas longer than it did after Hurricane Rita in 2005, one company said.

Damage was so widespread in the Houston-Galveston area that CenterPoint Energy asked customers not to call in reports of outages.

"CenterPoint Energy knows the location of the power outages and requests customers call only to report safety concerns, such as downed power lines and natural gas leaks," the company said on its Web site.

East Texas and Louisiana were still recovering from Hurricane Gustav when Hurricane Ike struck. About 60,000 customers in Louisiana still had not been re-connected, according to Entergy, which provides electricity for the area. As of Saturday, another 70,500 people in Louisiana lost their power due to Ike.

In Texas, 99 percent of Entergy's 395,000 customers lost power.

"The damage is more extensive than that caused by Hurricane Rita," the company said on its Web site. "Restoration for Ike will take longer than the three weeks needed to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Rita."