NORTH VERNON, Ind. — Damage from weekend wind storms that raked the state left thousands of southeastern Indiana residents facing the prospect Wednesday of no electricity until next week, little water and even shortages of gasoline to power their cars and generators.

About 80 percent of rural Jennings County still had no electricity Wednesday morning, and 700 to 800 residents in two townships had no water, said Michelle Evans, the county’s emergency management director.

Statewide, major power companies still had more than 70,000 customers without service Wednesday morning, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security said, although those figures did not include REMCs that power many rural areas.

In northwest Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels declared a state of disaster in flooded Lake and Porter counties after surveying waterlogged communities by air and boat Tuesday.

Duke Energy, the state’s largest power company, reported 55,477 customers still without power, down from the total of 368,091 that lost service after remnants of Hurricane Ike blasted the state Sunday with high winds, toppling trees and power lines.

Evans said Duke was only one of the five power companies serving her county about 50 miles north of Louisville, Ky. She said she’s been told she won’t have power back to her own home before the weekend.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much food has been lost,” Evans said.

Rick Graham of the town of Commiskey worried that he might lose a freezer full of food.

“We gotta keep some kind of power going, and the generator’s all we’ve got,” he said. Water was another concern. “We ain’t got enough water pressure to really fill up a bucket full of water.”

Mike Jones, a 58-year-old Bloomington resident who has survived two heart attacks, keeps insulin refrigerated to treat his diabetes, and also relies on an electricity-powered oxygen tank. He said Duke Energy told him he might not have power until Saturday.

“I’ll tell ya what I miss — my television. I love Westerns. And right now I’m jonesin’. I ain’t seen a cowboy in four days,” Jones told The Herald-Times of Bloomington.

Duke spokeswoman Angeline Protogere said a downed power line feeding a substation that supplies power to a Jennings County REMC would be repaired Wednesday, but she said the company had substations down all across its Indiana service territory, which covers much of the southern two-thirds of the state.

Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman toured parts of southern Indiana on Tuesday.

“I could not have imagined this much destruction from a wind event. We’ve seen far more damage than the aftermath of a number of tornadoes,” Skillman said.

Indiana Homeland Security said most of the gas stations in Dearborn County in the far southeast corner of the state had run out of fuel, and distributors also had run out of fuel.

Dearborn County’s emergency management director, Bill Black Jr., said motorists from nearby Ohio and Kentucky, where gas stations were left without power, had created a run on gas in the Lawrenceburg area. But he said more fuel was on its way.

“Tankers are coming in. They’re getting replenished now,” Black said Wednesday morning.

Homeland Security Director Joseph Wainscott Jr. was touring Jennings County and other parts of southern Indiana Wednesday, spokeswoman Rachel Meyer said.

Northern Indiana’s weekend deluge of rain — up to a foot in some areas — left road crews still working Wednesday morning to pump water from swamped lanes of Interstate 80/94, four days after State Police closed the highway and Interstate 65 because of high water.

Andy Dietrick, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said Wednesday that it was unclear when the highways might reopen. Once the water recedes and roads are dry, engineers will check the structural integrity of the roads, bridges and overpasses.

“We have a lot of guys out working on it but the water hasn’t gone down much,” he said.

Tolls were temporarily waived on part of the Indiana Toll Road near the Illinois state line to help clear traffic.