Area experiences power outage
By Staff Reports
Published in News on January 1, 2009 1:46 PM
Close to 15,000 Progress Energy customers were without power at one time or another Wednesday, including more than 1,400 in the Goldsboro area, because of high winds.
James Boyette with the Wayne County Office of Emer-gency Services, said there were no reports of wrecks or injuries because of the outage.
"To my knowledge there were no problems other than burglar alarms going off," he said.
Officials at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base said the outage had not caused any problems on base.
The lights flickered before going out at about 2:04 p.m. when the wind blew a tree into a 23,000-volt feeder line, said Progress Energy spokesman Drew Elliot. The power had been restored by 2:35 p.m.
Elliot said the tree was outside the right of way of the power line near Tanglewood Trail Court.
"It was definitely the wind blowing the trees," he said. "We have been having a lot of these across the system today."
Elliot said it was difficult to provide an exact number of customers affected because of the nature of the rolling outages. The 15,000 was a cumulative number, he said.
As of 4 p.m., about 1,000 customers were still without power.