News

Power back on for all but eight customers

By Lightning Reports, Published: April 16, 2020

Utility crews took advantage of three days of good weather to restore power to nearly all the homes and businesses in the Carolinas that lost power in Sunday night's windstorm.

Power outages in Henderson County peaked at more than 24,000. On Thursday morning eight customers in the county were still without power. Duke Energy reported no power outages in Buncombe, Transylvania and Polk counties.

Craig DeBrew, a Duke Energy manager for the region, said more than 500 workers supported the Hendersonville Operations Center in the three days of repairs. He thanked emergency management personnel and county leaders for their partnership and support of the effort.

Dispatchers fielded 306 911 calls and 349 administrative calls from midnight to 3 p.m. Monday, including 10 car crashes, four structure fires, 62 reports of downed power lines down and 153 reports of trees down.

"Henderson County has the most outages in WNC and there are some roads they're still cleaning up but a lot of power outages are still affecting our communities," Sheriff's Maj. Frank Stout said.

Roads that remained closed Monday afternoon included N.C. 191 at Hooper Lane, Kanuga Road, Crab Creek Road and U.S. 64 at Oakdale Cemetery. Jackson Park was closed because of high water.

Paid and volunteer firefighters raced to emergency calls all night long.

"They've been working real hard to get the calls prioritized and to make sure Duke knows where the real trouble areas are," said Emergency Services Director Jimmy Brissie. Power outages "got up to about 24,000" at their peak. "Of those 235 calls, we're aware of six structures that were damaged by trees falling on them. There were no injuries so we're very thankful for that." NCDOT reported "about 30 roads that had pretty significant tree-fall on them that they were looking to clear."

Rainfall totals varied, with 3.36 inches on Pinnacle Mountain the highest amount.