A stretch of Burlington Mills Road in Wake Forest is shut down indefinitely after downed power lines knocked out electricity to thousands of customers across the Raleigh area Friday. The closure, between 1 World Way and Urial Drive, has no estimated timetable for reopening, and drivers are being urged to steer clear of the area entirely.
Duke Energy customers across the region are without power, with outages particularly concentrated around Glenwood Avenue, Leesville Road, Page Road and Angier Avenue, according to ABC11. The outage map cited by the station shows thousands of customers affected, with more than 3,000 outages reported in Wake County alone. Duke Energy says it is still working to determine what caused the outage.
The closed section of Burlington Mills Road sits along a corridor that has become one of northern Wake County's busiest growth zones. The road is part of the North Carolina Department of Transportation's $1.3 billion Capital Boulevard North Upgrade project, which is slated to convert U.S. 1 into a six-lane freeway and build a new grade-separated interchange right at Burlington Mills Road, according to the agency's project materials. The area has also seen rapid residential expansion, including an approved 329-unit multi-family development at Burlington Mills Road and Urial Drive and an approved standalone WakeMed emergency healthplex, per the Town of Wake Forest's development records.
A Region Already Strained by Repeated Outages
Friday's blackout is the second major Wake County power failure in less than 48 hours. A transmission line fault on September 3 cut power to nearly 22,000 Duke Energy customers across Cary and Morrisville amid 101-degree heat, as Hoodline previously reported. That closely follows a pattern of recent grid trouble in the Triangle, including a July storm system that knocked out power to roughly 13,000 Duke Energy customers stretching from south of Interstate 440 near Lassiter Mill Road up through Interstate 540, and an August incident in which a truck collision snapped a utility pole and closed Falls of Neuse Road near Interstate 540.
Duke Energy Progress, the utility responding to Friday's outage, supplies electricity to roughly 1.7 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 28,000-square-mile service territory spanning North Carolina and South Carolina, and it holds the largest share of electric customer accounts in Wake County, according to energy-industry data. The company has said that about 75% of its North Carolina customers are covered by automated self-healing grid technology, which it credits with preventing more than 1.1 million customer outages statewide through October 2025 by automatically rerouting power around damaged line segments. Whether that system played any role in containing Friday's outage has not been addressed.
What Drivers Should Know at Dark Intersections
With traffic signals knocked out in parts of the outage zone, North Carolina law requires drivers approaching an unlit intersection to treat it as an all-way stop unless an officer is actively directing traffic, under General Statute § 20-158(b)(6). North Carolina Emergency Management guidance also instructs residents to treat all downed or sagging power lines as live and energized, keep a safe distance, and report any hazards to dispatchers or utility crews rather than approaching them.
The cost of shoring up the grid against these repeated failures has already shown up on customer bills. Duke Energy customers in North Carolina saw electricity rates rise 7.7% in January after state regulators approved multi-billion-dollar investments in grid modernization, weather-hardening and capacity expansion, according to the North Carolina Utilities Commission. For now, Duke Energy has not released a restoration estimate for the Burlington Mills Road closure or the broader Raleigh-area outage, and residents in the affected neighborhoods are being told to expect delays until crews can assess and repair the damaged lines.
