More than 1,100 Duke Energy customers lost power Saturday afternoon near the South Carolina-North Carolina line, with the outage centered along Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway in the Fingerville area. Officials reported 1,108 customers were without power as of 1:29 p.m., and crews were en route to fix the problem.
Duke Energy reported that more than 1,100 customers near the state line lost power Saturday, according to FOX Carolina. The outage was concentrated along the stretch of Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway running through the Fingerville area near the state line. Officials estimated power would be restored sometime between 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., though that window was an estimate issued as crews headed to the scene rather than confirmation that service had come back online.
A Rural Corridor Goes Dark
Fingerville sits along a scenic highway corridor that's seen its share of utility disruptions this year. The timeline of Saturday's outage, including the customer count and restoration estimate, comes from the same report, which has not indicated what triggered the loss of power or whether all affected customers have since been reconnected.
This is not the only recent outage to hit the county. A separate west-side Spartanburg County outage knocked out power to more than 2,000 Duke Energy customers on a Friday evening, according to WSPA. By 10 p.m. that night, roughly 2,391 customers remained in the dark and the utility's outage map showed three active trouble spots across the county, the station reported. Power in that incident was estimated to be restored by 10 a.m. Saturday, but customers were still without power at midnight.
Pattern of Outages Across the County
Spartanburg County has also seen outages tied to vehicle crashes damaging utility equipment. In one earlier incident, Duke Energy reported 1,226 customers without power after a vehicle struck its equipment, with service restored by 9 p.m., FOX Carolina reported in a separate article. Hoodline previously covered a similar episode in which a crash snapped a power pole and cut electricity to over a thousand homes.
That earlier Hoodline report also noted that utility poles are a persistent hazard on South Carolina roads. The state recorded 1,410 traffic collisions involving utility poles in 2023 alone, including 23 fatal collisions and 32 serious-injury incidents. Spartanburg County tied Greenville County for the state's deadliest crash total that year, with 71 fatal collisions recorded alongside 11,002 total traffic accidents and nearly 2,400 injury crashes, according to the same report.
No cause has been confirmed for Saturday's Fingerville-area outage, and it remains unclear whether the full count of affected customers changed after the 1:29 p.m. snapshot. Duke Energy crews were still working toward the estimated afternoon restoration window as of the latest report.
