After Hurricane Dorian, crews get to work restoring power

Duke Energy’s corporate communications teammates are embedded with crews throughout the Carolinas to support Hurricane Dorian efforts. Here are their reports from Friday, Sept. 6.

NIght restoration in Florence, S.C.

Looking at the bright blue sky on Friday in Florence, S.C., you’d never know Hurricane Dorian had passed through the day before, but its evidence remained in fallen tree limbs and scattered power outages. Landon Joyner and Shawn Driggers were two of the local crews working to erase that evidence, too.

Shawn Driggers at work in Florence.

At the height of the storm, more than 200,000 Duke Energy customers lost power in the Carolinas, with the coastal counties taking the brunt of the damage. By lunch on Friday, though, crews had restored power to all of Florence.

Like most line workers, Joyner and Driggers worked 16-hour days following the hurricane. On Thursday night, wearing rain coats and soggy boots, they replaced a line that was pulled down by trees. That rainy repair restored power to 500 customers on Dunbarton Drive, including a shopping center and row of hotels. Less than 10 hours later, they were cleaning up the remaining outages on smaller residential streets.

With their hometown taken care of, Joyner and Driggers will likely travel to the North Carolina coast to help with remaining restoration.

“We don’t stop,” Joyner said, “until all the lights are back on.”

Hurricane Dorian did the most damage in coastal North Carolina. By midday Friday, Duke Energy restored power to more than 100,000 customers outages. Here's a look at damage and restoration work in the Carolinas:

Video taken with a drone shows damage in Tabor City, N.C.