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The Canadian Press

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HALIFAX - People in the Maritimes dug out and in some cases waited for the lights to come back on Friday after a blizzard pounded parts of the region with snow and high winds.

The New Year's Day storm left thousands of residents in the dark in parts of the region, disrupted highway travel and grounded flights at a number of airports.

The most snow - 49 centimetres - was recorded at the Charlottetown airport, but the real trouble seemed to be in Nova Scotia where nearly 11,000 customers were without power at the peak of the storm.

Virtually all of the outages were in the eastern part of the province and Cape Breton, where more than 35 centimetres of snow had fallen in some areas.

By Friday afternoon, Nova Scotia Power reported the number of outages at about 4,000 customers, but blizzard warnings remained in effect in the Cape Breton Highlands.

Glennie Langille, a spokeswoman for the utility, said about 100 power crews were working to reconnect customers.

At the beginning of last week, heavy snow and hurricane-force winds left up to 60,000 customers without power.

Another round of power failures a couple of days later affected more than 40,000 customers.

On Christmas Day, more than 8,000 homes and businesses across the province lost power.