Thousands of Berkeley Electric Cooperative customers woke up Friday morning without power, as the utility's outage map reported 2,513 customers affected amid multiple outages across the area. No restoration time had been announced for those still waiting for the lights to come back on.
The outage count was reported by WCIV, which cited Berkeley Electric's own outage map showing the 2,513 figure Friday morning. The station's report did not identify a cause or a timeline for when crews expected to restore service, leaving affected customers with little to go on beyond the raw numbers.
A separate outage-tracking page, poweroutage.us, showed a different snapshot of 2,513 homes and businesses without power across the Berkeley Electric Coop service area, though the exact time that figure was captured was not specified, so it cannot be directly compared to the Friday-morning count. That same page put the cooperative's outages at 1.79% of the 140,717 customers it tracks.
How Berkeley Electric's Outages Stack Up Nationally
Per poweroutage.us, Berkeley Electric Cooperative currently ranks 13th nationwide for total power outages and sixth for the percentage of customers affected among utilities the site monitors. The page also flagged Dorchester County, South Carolina, as the hardest-hit area it tracks, with 40.33% of customers there without power.
Those rankings and percentages come from the outage-tracking site and are not tied to a specific date in the available reporting, so they should be read as a general snapshot of conditions rather than a direct measurement of Friday's outage alone.
A History Of Large-Scale Outages In The Area
Friday's outage is far from the first time Berkeley Electric customers have faced widespread blackouts. A previous outage in the Summerville area affected 7,028 customers at around 9:50 p.m., with at least 179 separate outages reported that night, according to a report from abcnews4.com. Power in that case was ultimately restored after three Berkeley Electric Cooperative substations had lost power.
In another earlier incident, a vehicle collision with a utility pole knocked out power for close to 1,937 Berkeley Electric Cooperative customers, a cooperative spokesperson confirmed at the time, per the same abcnews4.com report. A separate mass outage covered by counton2.com saw more than 10,000 Berkeley Electric Cooperative customers reportedly lose power around 10:30 p.m., which the cooperative attributed to a loss of transmission to two substations in the county.
In that counton2.com-reported case, crews worked on rerouting power while the cause was identified and corrected, and by 11:11 p.m. the outage map showed only two customers still without service. No comparable restoration update has yet been provided for Friday's outage affecting the 2,513 customers on Berkeley Electric's map.
