Bonnie Leaves Thousands Without Power from the Coast to the Triangle

As of noon Friday, Carolina Power and Light reported about 58,000 customers in North Carolina are without power. Most of those outages are in Wilmington, Whiteville, New Bern and Morehead City. The company hopes to have power restore to the hardest hit areas by Sunday night.

There are thousands of other people in our area served byelectric cooperatives. By Friday, restoration efforts have reduced outages to 9,000 customers. At its peak, 139,500 customers served by the cooperatives were without power.

BellSouth reports several hundred people in the area are without phone service in the Triangle.

As Hurricane Bonnie battered the coast,CP&Lemployees staffing the company's storm center waited to mobilize hundreds of workers. Restoration efforts were frustrated because Bonnie had stalled along the coast Wednesday and early Thursday.

"When the storm was expected to be further on inland and moving on out, [that] would have enabled us to have had crews working at this point in time," said CP&L's Bill England on Wednesday afternoon.

In all, CP&L has called in over 3,700 power line and tree removal workers, from five states. Repairs could take some time because of flooding in many areas.