To report an outage, call
1-800-448-2383
Crews Battling Outages from Extreme Winds Continuing Friday Night
Crews continue battling high winds and trees that are damaging power lines to restore power to Blue Ridge Energy members.
Blue Ridge Energy line technicians anticipate power restoration work continuing tonight as sustained 60-mile-per-hour wind gusts linger Friday evening, leading to new damage and outages across the cooperative’s service area of the western North Carolina counties of Caldwell, Watauga, Ashe, Alleghany and parts of Avery, Alexander and Wilkes.
The cooperative is receiving assistance from sister cooperative Blue Ridge Electric in South Carolina as well as contractor Sumter Utilities.
As of 5:30 Friday, 471 members have outages: 224 in Alleghany County; 102 in Wilkes County; 97 in Caldwell County; 46 in Watauga County and two in Ashe County. Members are advised to be prepared as weather forecasts call for continued extreme high winds until Saturday. Crews will be working throughout tonight to restore power for affected members, and additional outages are likely due to the weather.
To report outages, members can use the Blue Ridge mobile app (download: https://cbrk4.app.goo.gl/5S4M) or call the cooperative’s PowerLine: 1-800-448-2383.
A total of 12,203 members have been impacted since Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Extreme, sustained high winds, coupled with saturated ground after weeks of heavy rain, have brought down numerous trees onto power lines. Many power poles have been broken and 173 different locations on the electric system have been damaged. The single largest outage was Thursday evening when a high voltage transmission line was damaged, affecting over 5,000 members for 4 hours as crews used special equipment to reach the remote mountain ridge top. Line technicians scaled the large transmission pole with special ladders to make repairs and restore power before midnight.
Blue Ridge Energy advises the public to be alert for downed power lines. If you see a downed line, stay far away as it could still be energized and therefore dangerous and even deadly. Call the cooperative immediately to report it at: 1-800-451-5474.
To check outage status at any time, see the cooperative’s outage map available at www.BlueRidgeEnergy.com and on the Blue Ridge mobile app. Blue Ridge Energy also posts information during major outages and alerts on its social media channels: www.facebook.com/blueridgeenergy; www.instagram.com/blueridgeenergy and www.twitter.com/blueridgeemc.
Blue Ridge Electric serves some 75,000 members in Caldwell, Watauga, Ashe, Alleghany, Wilkes, Avery and Alexander counties.