Tornado confirmed north of Charlotte as thousands still without power in NC, SC
About 12,000 Duke Energy customers remained without power on Wednesday afternoon after the remnants of Tropical Depression Fred ripped through the company’s electric grid in the mountains and foothills of the Carolinas, company officials said.
Duke Energy blamed high winds and heavy rains from Tuesday’s storm for “significant structural damage to the electrical grid in western parts of the Carolinas,” according to a statement on the Charlotte utility’s outage map site.
A tornado with peak 110-mph winds damaged a couple of homes and snapped trees 20 feet in the air Tuesday on the Iredell-Alexander county line, a National Weather Service storm damage survey team confirmed late Wednesday afternoon.
No one was hurt as the EF-1 twister — second weakest on the Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornado intensity and damage — carved a 5.1-mile path through a rural stretch of the counties, the NWS team reported.
Thirty people remained missing Wednesday in Haywood County floods, west of Asheville, and Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency for the state, citing ongoing mountain flood rescues and widespread outages across North Carolina.
Tuesday night, Duke Energy reported 39,000 customers without power in the Carolinas. By noon Wednesday, the number fell to 19,000, according to the company’s outage map.
The NWS Greer office issued a total of 37 tornado warnings across its coverage area on Tuesday, according to its online tornado warning count chart. The count for the year totaled 62 warnings by Wednesday, one more than all of last year and the most warnings for a year since at least the mid-1980s, according to NWS records.
The coverage area includes the Charlotte region, Upstate South Carolina and parts of the foothills and mountains of the Carolinas.
Duke works to restore power
By Tuesday evening, 39,200 Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas were without power, including about 3,000 in the Charlotte area.
At 6 p.m., about 2,000 of the outages were just north of Charlotte’s airport, according to the Duke Energy outage map. Virtually all power was restored in Mecklenburg County by 8:30 p.m., while 14,400 customers in McDowell County in the mountains remained without electricity at that hour.
Most outages should be restored on Wednesday, “but some may linger” into Thursday, Duke Energy spokeswoman Meghan Musgrave Miles told the Observer just before noon.
“Workers have made great progress making repairs and restoring service for customers, and crews from the Charlotte area and the Triad traveled from their home-base locations to assist with power restoration in the hardest-hit areas as well,” Miles said in an email.
“We will continue to update the outage map with estimated times of restoration,” she said.
This week’s weather
Sunshine finally returned to Charlotte on Wednesday and should remain on Thursday, before showers are expected again on Friday, according to the NWS forecast at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Mostly sunny skies are expected Saturday and Sunday.
Highs the rest of the week are predicted to hover in the high 80s to low 90s, NWS meteorologists said.
This story was originally published August 18, 2021 at 12:50 PM.