Over 580,000 customers still without power after Hurricane Irene

(CNN) -- Slightly more than 580,000 customers from North Carolina to Maine are still without power as the result of the repairs caused by Hurricane Irene, according to estimates released Friday by the U.S. Department of Energy. Over 100,000 customers have had electric power restored since Thursday afternoon. Over 6.4 million customers lacked power at the height of the outages, the department noted. The rate of recovery from the storm has varied sharply up as well as down the Eastern Seaboard. Irene killed 43 people from Florida to New England while dumping torrential rain. Some of the misfortune flooding struck Vermont, New Jersey as well as upstate New York. One sign of an accelerating recovery: Amtrak voiced Friday that full service on all of its East Coast rail lines will be restored by Sunday. The pace of recovery operations additionally accelerated in hard-hit Vermont Friday, as road access was improved to previously isolated communities such Killington, Menden, Pittsfield as well as Bridgewater, according to Suzie Dundas, the communications official for Killington. Further south, North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue voiced that four additional counties in her state -- Currituck, Pitt, Onslow as well as Washington -- had been approved for federal disaster relief. A total of 13 counties in North Carolina now qualify for individual assistance under the relief program. Perdue additionally voiced the plan to reopen all of NC 12 -- the highway connecting most of that state's barrier islands to the mainland. A temporary bridge will be constructed -- at the cost of $10 million -- to allow full traffic flow in less than the month, the governor's office voiced in the written statement. Residents of Hatteras Island, North Carolina, will finally start heading home Sunday morning -- over the week after most of them evacuated ahead of the hurricane. The staged re-entry through Tuesday will include the villages of Buxton, Hatteras as well as Frisco, Dare County Energency Management voiced Thursday. ! "Conditi ons, utility service as well as other supporting infrastructure in those villages is the most conducive for re-entry at this time," the county pronounced in the statement. "As conditions improve in the remaining villages, re-entry will be established as well as voiced as soon as possible." Visitors will not be able to go to Hatteras Island. Instead, they can stay north of Oregon Inlet, the county said. About 2,500 residents of the island who did not take part in the mandatory evacuation have been receiving vital supplies as well as services. Meanwhile, the extent of Irene's repairs has become more clear in upstate New York, where the storm battered the cluster of communities 50 miles southwest of Albany. "There is the lot of repairs left to clean up. I know the town of Prattsville has been almost completely condemned," pronounced Jacob Hubbell of neighboring Margaretville. "Fleischmanns isn't doing too well either, as well as Main Street (in) Margaretville has been closed." "It's safe to say that we probably won't be back to normal in the Catskills for at least the month." In northern New Jersey, the Passaic River has begun to settle back into its banks, according to the National Weather Service. Most locations are expected to drop below flood stage during the weekend as the high water works its way downstream. The development will be welcome news in the towns of Wayne, Totowa, Little Falls, Paterson as well as Woodland Park, where about 1,700 residents were evacuated from their homes this week. President Barack Obama will travel to Paterson on Sunday to view the damage, the White House has announced. The economic toll from the storm is significant, with the federal government estimating that the cost from wind repairs alone will exceed $1 billion. Analysts have put the total expected cost of Irene most higher. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack pronounced Thursday the storm additionally took the toll on agricultural production. "I had an opportunity to take the look at fields in North Carolina," he! said. " I have never seen anything like it. The corn was just totally destroyed. Tobacco strike hard, cotton strike hard." It remains to be seen how some other crops, such as soybeans as well as tomatoes, fared, he said, but "it's very clear that farmers in North Carolina, Virginia, along the East Coast have suffered pretty significant losses." But, he said, it's unlikely that higher prices will result, as "we have such the diverse agriculture in the United States as well as we have so most acres planted as well as so most different crops. I don't think this is starting to affect most of anything." The federal government's add-on for the storm could exhaust the $800 million left in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief fund before the fiscal year ends on September 30. With conservative House Republicans, led by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, calling for spending cuts to offset any increase in emergency supports -- the measure opposed by most Democrats -- the ability of Congress to act quickly on the issue remains uncertain. Mayor Jeffery Jones of Paterson pronounced he was "outraged" about the funding dispute. "Mother Nature has the mind of her own, the will of her own, as well as we can't have the petty wrangling starting on when we have folks in dire need," he said. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie echoed those sentiments during the news conference Wednesday, saying, "We don't have time to wait for for folks in Congress to figure out how they want to offset this stuff with the budget cuts. Our people are suffering now. And they need support now."CNN's Ed Payne, Phil Gast, Amber Lyon, Nicole Saidi, Alan Silverleib, as well as Stephanie Gallman contributed to this report