More than 462,000 homes and businesses in the U. S. Southeast, mostly in North Carolina and South Carolina, were still without power on Monday after Hurricane Florence hit the North Carolina coast on Friday, power companies said.
(Reuters) – More than 462,000 homes and businesses in the U. S. Southeast, mostly in North Carolina and South Carolina, were still without power on Monday after Hurricane Florence hit the North Carolina coast on Friday, power companies said.
That was down from a total of 1.8 million customers who had power outages since the storm made landfall.
Florence, now a tropical depression, continued to dump rain on the Appalachian Mountains on Monday as it moved toward New England, which could result in more flooding in the Carolinas as rivers swell.
Duke Energy Corp, the biggest utility in the area with over 4 million customers, said it could take a week or more to fix the remaining outages. Duke has already restored more than 1.1 million of its roughly 1.4 million customers affected by the storm.
Duke said it had more than 20,000 personnel ready to start fixing outages as soon as conditions allowed, including over 8,000 from Duke’s Carolinas utilities, 1,700 from the Midwest, 1,200 from Florida and 9,400 from other utilities.
