ALBANY - Gov. David Paterson on Saturday declared a state disaster emergency to speed assistance to 16 upstate New York counties in the wake of a debilitating ice storm.

The storm coated a region stretching from the mid Hudson Valley to the southern Adirondacks with up to a half-inch of ice, felling trees and knocking down power lines.

Utilities, scrambling to restore power, are calling in help from other states. Paterson said the emergency declaration will help bring out-of-state utility crews into New York faster and provide state help to local governments.

Crews worked through the night to clear roads blocked by trees and downed power lines. They were still scrambling on Saturday afternoon, as tens of thousands remained without electricity.

National Grid said at the peak of the storm Friday it had 229,000 customers without power. By Saturday afternoon, crews had restored power to 100,000 of them, said utility spokesman Patrick Stella.

The Albany-area utility had more than 600 repair crews - some called in from as far away as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania - spread out through the region cleaning up the mess and getting the power back on, but it remained unclear how long it would take to get it all done, Stella said.

“In some of the recent storms in the capital region, restoring 100,000 would have been the end of restoration effort,” he said.

Meanwhile, in the Hudson Valley, some 22,000 Central Hudson Gas & Electric customers remained without power Saturday afternoon. Some of them - mainly in northern Dutchess and southern Columbia counties, which were particularly hard hit - might not have their power restored until as late as Tuesday, said utility spokesman John Maserjian.

An update from NYSEG, which was reporting about 32,000 outages on Friday, was not immediately available.

“Things are much better,” said Carol Breen, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation. “But there are still trees coming down because of ice on branches; they're heavy and they can break at any point.”

More than 1,200 workers helped clear most state roads of trees that blocked them, Breen said.