BREC, Duke Energy work to restore power outages in counties affected by Florence

Power companies said they worked feverishly through late Friday and all day Saturday to restore power to individual homes and businesses in the region in the wake of Hurricane Florence.

As of 5 p.m. Saturday, Black River Electric Cooperative reported less than 100 outages remaining in its four-county service area of Sumter, Clarendon, Lee and Kershaw counties, with the vast majority of those in Kershaw.

“We just broke the 100 mark,” said James Moye, BREC’s vice president of engineering.

At the worst point early Saturday morning, Moye said about 5,000 BREC customers – homes and/or businesses – had outages reported.

He said BREC linemen planned to have everyone’s power back on by Saturday night.

But, the tail-end of the storm could bring more outages, weather meteorologists have said.

Duke Energy Progress, which also has customers in Sumter, Clarendon and Lee counties, had also worked its outage totals down considerably by late Saturday afternoon.

As of 5:30 p.m. Saturday, about 850 of Duke’s 31,346 customers in Sumter County were still without power. At 8 a.m. Saturday, that total was 3,728.

Most of Duke’s customers in Sumter County are within the City of Sumter.

A total of 178 Duke Energy customers in Clarendon were without power as of 5:30 p.m. That number had decreased from 864 at 8 a.m. Saturday.