| Carolina Power
and Light outages went up from 350,000 to 411,000, mostly in the Raleigh
area, the utility said. CP&L said it was starting to make more
progress Friday morning. While it hoped to have most customers back on
line by Sunday, the utility predicted it won't be able to restore power to
all customers until Monday and Tuesday.
"We had crews out overnight working on the trees. We have to clear tree limbs before the crews can work on the lines to restore power. It's a mess out there," said Kathy Bryant, a CP&L spokeswoman. CP&L said large trees are down, trees that aren't down are split in half and bent trees are popping back up, sometimes taking down restored lines. Sandra Magee, spokeswoman for Duke Power, said that "it's going to be days" before most of the power is restored. She said progress was made in some areas of South Carolina overnight, but the number of outages went up in Durham and Chapel Hill in North Carolina. "In general it averaged out" to more than a million outages Thursday night to Friday morning, she said. "It's a huge event. It's the worst we've ever seen in our history. It's very widespread." The utility believes that above-freezing temperatures during the day -- expected to be in the 40s -- and dogged efforts of crews untangling power lines from debris will bring down the number of customers without power. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said the temperatures in the Raleigh-Durham area were in the 20s overnight and were expected to drop into the teens Friday night. North Carolina emergency management officials said the power outages in the state totaled 1.5 million, affecting customers of CP&L, Duke Power and a number of electric power cooperatives. Peter Bent of Durham said he and his family were awakened early Thursday by the "sound of cracking branches," which he said ruefully is "a very distinctive sound." "We're doing our best to cope with it," he said. "We are hoping for the best." Another North Carolina resident said when he went into a Lowe's building materials store there were no heaters left for sale and people were buying framing lumber to burn in their fireplaces. Renee Hoffman, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, said emergency shelters were set up in 21 counties, and the facilities housed 1,500 people overnight. John Legare, spokesman for the South Carolina emergency management division, said 310,000 customers were without power throughout the state, most of whom are Duke Power customers. He said 70 people were in eight shelters.
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