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Almost 2,000 customers in Cary without power on Christmas Day - WRAL News

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Almost 2,000 customers in Cary without power on Christmas Day

A Duke Energy equipment failure left almost 2,000 Cary customers without power for a couple of hours on Christmas morning.

The outage covered an area of Cary from Chatham Street south to to SE Maynard Road, and from Kildaire Farm Road east to Walnut Street. It was first reported around 10 a.m., and Duke Energy had power restored by early afternoon.

At Christ the King Lutheran Church on Walnut Street, the 11 a.m. Christmas Day service went on as planned. A small crowd convened to celebrate the birth of Christ with daylight streaming in the windows and candles in hand.

Pastor Wolfgang Herz used part of his sermon to remind those in attendance that Christmas is about the coming of light.

"If you think about it, Christmas is all about god becoming human, god joining that human community, and that's all about relationships," he said.

In 2022, Christmas weekend power outage left 1/2 million in the cold

With temperatures in the 50s and expected to reach the mid-60s on Monday, the impact of the outage is much less severe than when Duke rolling blackouts left about half a million people without power last year on Christmas weekend. On Christmas Eve 2022, rapidly plunging temperatures and a spike in demand for electricity which outpaced projections caused Duke to resort to rolling blackouts. Outages that should have lasted 15 to 30 minutes, instead lasted hours.
Jodi Leese Glusco Shelle Jackson Josie Zimmer

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