CHARLOTTE, N.C. — About 12,000 Duke Energy customers remained without power 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.
Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency, citing ongoing mountain flood rescues and widespread outages across the state. 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 Duke Energy outage map.
Meanwhile, survey teams from the National Weather Service in Greer, South Carolina, headed to Iredell and Alexander counties to officially confirm at least two tornadoes from Tuesday’s storms, NWS meteorologist Doug Outlaw told The Charlotte Observer.
Reports on the path of the storms, their intensity and any damage they caused could be completed and then posted on the NWS Greer office’s website later Wednesday, he said.
NWS meteorologists and county emergency management officials on Tuesday reported two possible tornadoes, the Observer previously reported.
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.
At 11:45 a.m., Alexander County received reports of a possible tornado in the Hiddenite-Stony Point area.
“Numerous trees are down,” county officials said in a news release, adding that emergency crews were assessing the extent of damage. No injuries or damage to buildings had been reported, officials said.
The storm that spawned the possible tornado entered Alexander from Iredell County along Old Mountain Road, Alexander County officials said. That’s in the Interstate 40 corridor.
At 12:36 p.m., a tornado was reported 14 miles north of Statesville near the rural Iredell County community of Harmony, according to the NWS office in Greer.
No injuries or home or business damage were reported in connection with the possible tornadoes.
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 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.
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