THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 10, 1996 TAG: 9609100254
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 64 lines
Northeastern North Carolina residents who lost power during Hurricane Fran were enjoying the comforts of lights, stoves and air-conditioners again Monday.
Almost all of the North Carolina Power customers who saw electric service disrupted were back on line Monday.
``As of this morning, only 942 customers were still without power out of the more than 50,000 that reported outages during the storm,'' spokesman David Shelton said Monday in Roanoke Rapids.
For northeast residents, the worst of Hurricane Fran came hours before dawn Friday when lines blew down in bright blue flashes all over the Albemarle.
One out of every two North Carolina Power customers lost electricity, making Fran the worst storm for outages in the utility's history.
``We have a customer base of 100,384, and of this total 50,250 lost power sometime during the hurricane's passage through our service area,'' Shelton said.
``When you add up the number of repair crews called in and the fact that half of our customers lost power, we have to say this is the worst our company has ever experienced,'' Shelton added.
North Carolina Power and Virginia Power operate under a single corporate structure in Roanoke Rapids.
``Hurricane Fran left the combined utility with 390,000 customers without service from North Carolina to Washington, D.C.,'' said Bryant Brooks, community affairs manager for North Carolina.
Brooks said the previous ``worst storm'' came last winter during a blizzard and ice storm that left North Carolina and Virginia with ``a total of 180,000 customers out.''
North Carolina Power had 300 linemen working in the Albemarle from early Thursday through the weekend. Half were regular company employees and the rest were contracted workers.
North Carolina began ``staging'' for Hurricane Fran early last week when the storm's landfall in North Carolina was increasingly predicted by the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
``We do a lot of pre-planning when we have good advance information,'' Shelton said, ``and we had all kinds of equipment - power poles, wire, transformers - stockpiled where we thought we would need it.''
Travelers to Raleigh from the northeast coast saw miles of newly cut trees along the highways to the west. Rain-soaked ground from recent storms and Fran's additional soaking caused thousands of trees to go down and Department of Transportation crews chainsawed the trees close to their stumps. Then they pulled the trunks off the pavement to reopen the roads.
In all 1,000 linemen were working in Virginia and North Carolina in cleanup crews over the weekend.
``And we answered 220,000 phone calls for power outages on Friday, Saturday and Sunday,'' Shelton said.
Other power companies in the state responded to similar challenges. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Emerald Isle resident Kevin Collins walks under power lines downed
by Hurricane Fran. For residents of Northeastern North Carolina, the
worst of the storm came hours before dawn Friday when lines blew
down in bright blue flashes.
KEYWORDS: HURRICANE FRAN HURRICANES STORM DAMAGE
AFTERMATH by CNB