Andrews – Duke Energy has blamed several power outages affecting the Andrews Valley in Cherokee County on trees falling on lines.
Duke Energy spokeswoman Meghan Miles confirmed the three power outages affecting the area last week and earlier in July were caused by falling trees, including outside of the company's right of way. The outages occurred on July 2, July 11 and July 14.
"Trees are a beautiful part of the Carolinas, but they are the one of the No. 1 causes of power outages for our customers that we have," Miles said. "We do tree trimming. Much of the work is done proactively to remove trees inside our right of way, but there are trees outside our right of way that fall,” damaging equipment.
The first outage was a result of damage near Hyatt Creek Road and affected about 1,100 customers for 51/2 hours. The second outage stemmed from an incident near Bluff Road and affected about 2,300 Duke customers for three hours. The third outage was caused by damage near Old State Road and impacted about 1,600 customers for 31/2 hours.
“Our reliability and engineering teams installed a solution today that will add greater ability to help reduce the number of customers impacted by outages in the future,” Duke Energy community relations manager Lisa Leatherman said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor power reliability in the Town of Andrews and will evaluate opportunities for additional improvements in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience and frustration they might have caused.”
Mayor James Reid thanked Duke Energy for its response to the outages, but emphasized the seriousness of the issue from a commerce perspective.
"It's killing our local downtown businesses,” he said. "If they lose a whole day of sales on Sunday, it's a huge economic impact on them. I'm simply trying to be a liaison going to bat for them."
Reid said he would be meeting with Duke Energy representatives today to address the issues and search for solutions.
He added that he was originally told that it was a scheduled shutdown, when in fact it was not. In the immediate aftermath, Reid notified state Rep. Karl Gillespie and state Sen. Kevin Corbin (both R-Franklin).
"I would also like to commend our linemen for getting out there and busting their tails to get everything back together, Reid said. "I realize that sometimes we have trees outside of the right of way that no one will ever cut, and that's what really hurts them."
Assistant Editor Penny Ray contributed to this report.