(Photo: Duke Energy says their crews have restored more than 1 million customers in the wake of Hurricane Florence. Credit: Duke Energy on Twitter)Half a million customers were still without power in the wake of Florence as of 10 am EDT this morning, the Edison Electric Institute reported. Outages affecting approximately 504,000 customers are mainly in North Carolina.
Florence made landfall September 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, as a Category 1 hurricane and from there the slow-moving storm hammered the eastern part of the state. Some areas got 40 inches of rainfall, ABC News reported.
More than a million customers in North Carolina lost power. Florence got downgraded to a tropical depression by Friday evening, but flooding continued and the next day outages were also occurring eastern South Carolina. As of Sunday, the confirmed death toll had reached 18, according to CNN.
Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities in the region, reported on Sunday that 1.4 million customers in the Carolinas had experienced outages from the storm and that their crews had restored power to more than 1 million.
“Some of the most challenging power restoration work remains ahead in currently inaccessible coastal areas that experienced massive flooding and structural damage,” the utility noted. Duke Energy’s Electric Utilities and Infrastructure unit serves approximately 7.6 million retail electric customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.
Duke Energy is trying to determine whether the storm washed any coal ash from the Sutton Power Plant into Sutton Lake, Charlotte Business Journal’s John Downey reported today.
“The question is whether any stormwater carrying ash reached Sutton Lake, which was built as a cooling pond for the now-closed coal units at the Sutton plant but is now considered part of a US waterway,” Downey wrote.
A spokesperson for Duke Energy told the reporter that the company had no indication that any ash had reached the lake. Cape Fear Riverkeeper and the Southern Environmental Law Center told Downey that they are independently investigating.
Last year Duke Energy submitted a request to North Carolina regulators asking for a hike in electricity rates with more than half the increase going toward coal ash cleanup. In June, state regulators denied the utility’s rate hike request, ordered the utility to refund $60 million in deferred taxes to customers, and fined Duke Energy $70 million for the way it handled coal ash, the Asheville Citizen Times reported. However, the decision about who ultimately pays for cleanup remains unclear.
At least 53 drone teams have been recruited to help assess damage from Florence, Brian Reil, a spokesman for Edison Electric Institute, told Bloomberg. Each team usually brings more than one drone and the force collectively includes about 100 to 160 operators, Reil told the outlet.
“Local providers including Duke Energy Corp. and Southern Co. are deploying aerial equipment fitted with infrared and high-zoom sensors that can inspect substations, locate malfunctioning solar panels and even help to restring power lines,” according to Bloomberg.
Duke Energy has been using drones in the United States since 2015. In February, the utility announced that their team was using drones to help restring power lines in mountainous areas of Puerto Rico, a task that previously required a hazardous helicopter method. Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.
