Many Duke customers are still without power. As of midday Monday, 96% of customers in Madison County were still without electricity, along with
- 65% in Mitchell
- 45% in Buncombe
- 39% in Avery
- 26% in Yancey
- 13% in McDowell
Duke spokesman Bill Norton said a new substation is being brought into Madison County that will restore power to 1,000 customers.
In Buncombe County, the majority of outages are in Black Mountain and Swannanoa, the latter of which has two new substations.
“One has already been powered up, the other one should receive power very shortly. So you’ll begin to see chunks of customers, not just, you know, tens and hundreds, but thousands at a time come back on as critical transmission infrastructure is restored,” Norton said.
Originally, Duke estimated 90% of reachable customers would be restored by last Friday, which Norton asserts is true.
“After reassessing late last week, we told customers on Friday that we expected to have about 105,000 customers remaining as of Sunday night, and we hit that target,” Norton said. “But for our last, you know, 100,000 or so, many will be restored within a week.
Norton said that Duke would try to be flexible with customers are the power comes back on.
“You know, there’s not a formal policy in place in terms of a certain amount of time,” Norton said. “This is an ongoing situation. It’s still developing, and we will be flexible with our customers who have bill-paying needs.”
Norton said that power restoration is collaborative, relying on government agencies to rebuild infrastructure, which is part of why the pace from here on in is difficult to predict.
“We cannot do it ourselves, so we’re going to keep commuting with communicating with our customers by email, text, phone as soon as their individual details become available, there’s really not one size fits all solutions for what’s left.”