100,000 Carolinians without power days after Zeta. Some are fed up.
About 100,000 Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas remained without power Saturday morning, two days after the remnants of Tropical Storm Zeta pummeled many regions of the states, and some say they are fed up.
“I am not a happy camper,” Charlotte resident Ellen Eldredge Stenstrom posted on Facebook Friday after learning her power might not be restored until Saturday night.
“The biggest issue for me is I have a breathing disorder and need to have electricity for my breathing machine,” Stenstrom told The Charlotte Observer.
She also relies on a power lift chair to keep her feet up due to “very bad edema,” she said.
A generator is preserving groceries in her refrigerator, “but it can’t do everything,” she said. Fortunately restaurants are nearby, she said.
While unhappy with the length of the outage, she said, “I never begrudge the linemen, I respect them. I have truly learned to hunker down, but the medical needs prevail, and sometimes we just give it up and go find a hotel motel.”
At one point Thursday morning, about a half-million Carolinians had lost power due to the storm.
In an update posted on its outage map Saturday morning, Duke Energy said repairs to damage caused by Zeta continue and crews from the Midwest and Florida are assisting.
The company thanked customers for their “continued patience.”
While only a couple hundred customers in Mecklenburg County were still without power at 9 a.m. Saturday, 15,000 had no electricity in counties northwest of Mecklenburg, including about 7,700 in Catawba County.
Another 20,000 customers were without power in the Winstom-Salem area and a total of 16,000 in Rutherford and some N.C. mountain counties.
In South Carolina, Duke Energy reported about 32,000 customers without power in the Greenville-Spartanburg area.
N.C. electric cooperatives reported 8,700 of their customers without power Saturday morning, including nearly 2,000 in Iredell County.
Zeta was a Category 2 hurricane when it landed near Cocodrie, Louisiana, on Wednesday afternoon.
Zeta arrived in North Carolina as a tropical storm. Its fierce winds — gusts reached 55 mph in Charlotte — toppled trees onto homes in Ballantyne in south Charlotte and elsewhere across the region.
This story was originally published October 31, 2020 at 10:05 AM.