A fast-moving burst of severe weather barreled across Wake County on Tuesday night, cutting electricity to thousands and turning a routine summer evening into a scramble for flashlights. At the peak, roughly 13,000 customers lost power, and by the overnight update around 10,000 Duke Energy customers were still waiting in the dark for service to come back on.
The main outage zone stretched from south of Interstate 440 near Lassiter Mill Road up to just north of Interstate 540, according to CBS17, which cited WNCN and Duke Energy's outage map. Utility crews and local law enforcement fanned out to clear blocked roads and check on damage as reports continued to roll in.
The storms prompted a string of severe thunderstorm warnings and a couple of tornado warnings, turning a muggy night across central North Carolina into a weather-alert marathon. Earlier in the day, the National Weather Service in Raleigh had already pegged Wake County with a 50% chance of thunderstorms and gusts up to 25 mph, a forecast that ended up underselling just how intense the evening would feel for anyone under the heaviest cells.
Outages Follow Several Rounds of Triangle Storms
The latest wave of outages caps off what has been a rough stretch of summer storms around the Triangle. WRAL reported last week that earlier storms had already triggered flooding, brought down trees and knocked out power to more than 3,000 customers in Wake County, a reminder of how quickly a passing thunderstorm can turn into a neighborhood-scale headache.
Officials are urging residents to treat any downed power line as live and to steer clear of roads blocked by trees or utility equipment until crews can secure the scene. The City of Raleigh notes that Duke Energy Progress customers can report outages by texting OUT to 57801 or by calling 800-419-6356.
Duke Energy Outage Counts Kept Shifting
Even as the storm moved on, the situation was still very much in flux, with Duke Energy's outage map updating as crews assessed damage and restored pockets of service. CBS17 reported that outage totals and damage information would continue to be updated as new details came in.
