The winter storm over the weekend has left tens of thousands of people in the area without power.
Outages in the Upstate primarily impacted residents in northern Greenville and Spartanburg counties.
A spokesperson for Duke Energy said 83,000 customers lost power, but it had been restored to more than half of them as of Monday afternoon.
“Wet snow, the frozen precipitation… The wind really did a number on a lot of trees, which did a number on a lot of infrastructure,” said Duke Energy spokesperson Ryan Mosier.
Kellen Walton was sledding in his front yard Sunday afternoon when he saw a power line go down.
“We were like halfway down the hill, and then we heard the cracking and then the tree started to fall, and it tore down the power line,” Walton said. “And there was like a big blue spark and a really loud noise, and then everybody started walking out of their houses and stuff.”
The Duke Energy outage map showed hundreds of people in his south Greenville neighborhood were without power Monday evening. However, the energy company is making progress in restoring power. Mosier said they brought in about 9,000 people to help prepare for the storm in the Carolinas. He also said the outages are only going to get better going forward from Monday.
“Our issues with precipitation and cold are when we start getting freezing rain and that ice accumulates, and we don’t see that in the forecast this evening, so don’t expect new outages,” Mosier said.
Pockets of outages remain throughout the Upstate.
“We’re going to continue to work tonight and into tomorrow and beyond as necessary until we get every customer restored,” Mosier said.
He said some customers could be without power for multiple days.
“They’re small individual outages that you’re going to have to go into people’s backyards and repair a pole and go on down that road and down that street and down that neighborhood until you get each one fixed,” Mosier said.
