Piedmont Electric has sent four repair crews, totaling seventeen men and equipment to Pitt & Greene EMC in Farmville, NC. The team left early Sunday morning to assist with storm restoration resulting from Hurricane Irene.
August 29, 2011, 8:00 a.m. – North Carolina’s electric cooperatives have restored power to 89,000 households, down from 152,000 outages on Saturday.
Co-op crews are working diligently to reconnect power to 63,000 members still experiencing outages. Hurricane Irene’s high winds, rain and storm surge disrupted power to members in areas served by 17 of the state’s 26 electric cooperatives.
“The low-hanging fruit has been harvested,” said a co-op official from the field. “We’re working hard for the rest of it.”
Power restoration is complete in many of the inland counties. The remaining outages are concentrated mostly in the coastal and northeastern sections of the state, where storm damage is most severe.
Electric cooperative officials remind people to always stay away from downed or low-hanging power lines. All downed power lines should be treated as if they were energized and potentially deadly. People who see a downed line should stay away from it and report it to their local electric utility or 911.
A complete list of phone numbers to report outages and counties served by each co-op is listed at www.ncelectriccooperatives.com.
North Carolina’s electric cooperatives serve more than 2.5 million people in 93 of the state’s 100 counties, primarily in rural parts of the state.
