By Steve Huffman
shuffman@salisburypost.com
Barring unforeseen problems, power to all Rowan County homes and businesses was to have been restored by 11 p.m. Tuesday.
That’s the word from Duke Energy. The company reported 1,857 customers still without power as of 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The outages were the result of a winter storm that rolled up the East Coast Sunday, leaving Rowan County blanketed with 5 inches of snow, plus a variety of other inclement weather.
Paige Sheehan, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, said the utility realized the potential problems associated with the storm early on, and the combination of weather factors made its impact especially strong.
“At my house, it started off with heavy, heavy rain, followed by sleet and a heavy snow,” she said. “I think that combination is what made things worse.”
At the storm’s peak, about 185,000 Duke customers across North and South Carolina were without power. Sheehan said Duke predicted that power to all its customers in both states would be restored by late tonight.
She said Duke has more than 4,400 workers responding to the storm. That number includes about 750 workers who traveled to North or South Carolina from the Midwest or other service areas.
Sheehan said workers typically labor to restore power to their home areas before leaving to work elsewhere. That means, Sheehan said, that Duke Energy workers who live in, and are based in Rowan County, won’t leave to address problems in other areas until power outages closer to their homes are rectified.
“If there’s a power outage in your community, they’re there until they’re finished,” Sheehan said.
She said power outages as a result of Sunday’s storm were more severe in South Carolina, meaning some Rowan County workers may go there to work. And crews from neighboring communities and states may come to Rowan County once power is restored to homes in their immediate neighborhoods.
Sheehan said most Duke Energy work crews have been laboring 12 or 14 hours a day to get power restored to all customers.
Officials from neighboring EnergyUnited reported that power to all but 40 customers was restored by late Tuesday afternoon. At its peak, EnergyUnited had about 21,000 members without power in all 19 counties served by the cooperative.
Representatives of the cooperative said their hardest-hit counties included Rowan, as well as Davidson, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln, Mecklenburg and Stokes.