WAKE COUNTY, N.C. (WTVD) -- As the temperatures continue to tumble this week, ABC11 spoke with a Wake County homeowner who said he and several neighbors recently lost power for nearly a whole day -- without notice.
Dennis Lane of Middlesex was one of roughly 1,500 customers affected by that outage, half of which had extended outages. Lane said the power didn't return until midnight, a span of roughly 13 hours.
"Everyone that I've talked to that was out got no notification of power being out. None," said Lane on Monday.
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Lane contacted ABC11 after trying to get answers from Duke Energy, claiming that he and several local homeowners -- including his son, who lives next door -- never got advance word about the outage.
"To me, it's unreasonable for you to be without power for 13 hours. But the second part of that is being told they don't know what the problem is. But then you get on the Duke website that said it was, 'oh, they were doing an upgrade,'" he said.
ABC11 asked Duke Energy about the outage, which was listed on its website as an "equipment upgrade to enhance service". Spokesperson Jeff Brooks said the issue stemmed from an equipment failure near Zebulon.
"We worked to make a temporary repair, but we needed to come back and make a more permanent repair," he said. "And so we had to have an urgent outage on Friday to be able to make sure that we don't have future problems on that line."
Brooks said a message about the emergency repair was sent out to customers, but that those messages were based on the line crews were working on.
"We do our best to pull those lists based on the customer served on the line that we're working on. It's possible that there were one or two or so that didn't get any information. We'll be happy to look into that," he said.
ABC11 asked Brooks, as the temperatures plunge further this week, what similar repairs might mean for customers in the cold. Brooks said those temperatures are a factor in their decision-making.
"So sometimes that drives the decision. Other times we can put that repair off until maybe a Saturday or the day when it's less impactful. But we do our best to try to minimize impacts to customers as much as possible," Brooks said.
But Lane said -- after navigating the sudden outage -- that he's concerned about a repeat situation for other customers in even colder conditions.
"The temperature is going to be bad tomorrow and Wednesday, what happens if this happens again? And people are without power for 12, 13 hours?" he said.