GREENSBORO, N.C. — 2 Wants To Know is looking into the power restoration process.
If there is nothing wrong with the source or transmission lines or substation, the work really starts with the main power lines that deliver power to the area as a whole and emergency and essential services like hospitals. This is usually day one of the storm.
When do the crews get to your neighborhood?
Unless you're on this grid here with emergency services, it's likely day two.
“You may see us drive through your neighborhood shortly after the storm and not stop. We haven't forgotten about you, but we have to see what the damage is and then build a plan to get as many people on as quickly as we can,” said Jeff Brooks, Duke Energy Spokesperson.
Jeff Brooks with Duke Energy says winter storms are so much more difficult than summer storms. He says crews can see how the degrees and precipitation changed.
“It's really interesting to see, when you drive into an outage area you often see a very sharp line of where the outages start and that's because that's where the temperature changed or the precipitation changed to something else,” said Brooks.
It takes several hours-- like between 4 and 6 hours to fix an outage.
To put that into perspective for you the New Year's Day storm had a total of 6,000 outages, that's not the number of customers, that's the number of outages.
If each one took the minimal amount of time, 4 hours, that's 24,000 hours total. If you had 200 crews, that's 120 hours for each crew and if they worked around the clock, it would t's still 5 days worth of work.
If your power goes out, Simply text the word out to 57801 or you can call duke energy 1-800-POWER-ON.