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Duke Energy close to restoring power to all customer in Mecklenburg County post-Michael

By Mark Becker, wsoctv.com and Stephanie Tinoco
By Mark Becker, wsoctv.com and Stephanie Tinoco

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Thousands of Duke Energy customers remain without power two days after Tropical Storm Michael hit the Charlotte area.

As of Sunday evening, Mecklenburg County is down to less than 235 customers without power. This is down from 13,000 Saturday morning.

"The reason I reached out to WSOC-TV is because I'm fed up already with Duke Energy,” said Dina Zenovich, who has been without power for days.

[CLICK HERE for power outage map]

[MICHAEL AFTERMATH: Schools closed, thousands without power across Carolinas]

Additionally, more than 1,500 customers in Rowan County do not have power Sunday evening.

Duke Energy says on its website that it hopes to have all power restored in the area by Monday night, at the latest.

"All the food in the refrigerator is going bad because they’ve had no power for two days,” said Tom Wilson, who remains without power.

Duke Energy has linemen working hard to restore power as quickly as possible.

“We were projecting about 500,000 outages,” said Bill Norton, with Duke Energy. “We more than doubled. Thursday, with the winds blowing through and then hitting nighttime, we couldn’t even start the response until Friday.”

This is a decrease since Friday morning, when Channel 9 saw as many as 40,000 outages.

Duke Energy said it had as many as a million homes without power in the Carolinas on Thursday from the impacts of Tropical Storm Michael.

As crews work to restore power, Zenovich said she’s worried about her mother.

"She needs power because she has a heart condition. She has Alzheimer's,” she said.

Zenovich said she filled out a special needs medical form through Duke Energy and had her mother's doctor sign it, hoping to get medical priority and her lights turned on faster.

"I called their number, their line was busy, busy, busy,” Zenovich said.

Duke Energy said the special needs medical form does not mean a special needs customer will be first to have power restored, but what they do is alert special needs customers ahead storms to let them know alternate arrangements may be necessary if they expect power outages to affect the area.

"We're praying for Duke Power to get their job done,” Wilson said.

“Thank you everyone for their patience,” Norton said. “We’re working as hard as we can. If your house isn’t already restored, it will be soon.”

Thousands of customers had to make do without electricity throughout the night Thursday.

[Family believes power outage at Charlotte apartment complex led to woman's death]

“We're doing good,” Charlotte resident Douglas Welton said. “When it gets to 1:30 today, we will have been without power for 24 hours. We're surviving. If we can get some internet, we'll be happy too.”

For Tommy Haughton and many of his neighbors in Madison Park community, Thursday was a little bit like a campout at home.

“We got the candles going, we got our headlamps out,” Haughton said. “We were planning to make tacos last night and we were successful.”

[POWERFUL IMAGES: Catastrophic damage caused by Michael across Southeast]

Duke Energy officials said they had an outage of their own late Thursday that threw a wrench into their efforts to get power back on.

“I know that was frustrating for customers because they were trying to call in their outages as well as just general customer service things, like starting and stopping service,” said Duke spokesman Tim Pettit said.

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