Saturday, July 29, 2017
Associated Press
A man-made power outage – not an approaching hurricane – forced 10,000 tourists to flee two North Carolina islands and turned summer vacation into a messy nightmare for many.
Cars lined up Friday to get on ferries, the only way off Ocracoke Island, after a mandatory evacuation order was announced. Gas stations ran perilously low on fuel and ice, and business owners complained about losing a chunk of their most lucrative time of year due to a construction crew accidentally severing a main transmission line. Without power, air conditioners went silent and ceiling fans stopped humming as extremely humid temperatures reached 80 degrees.
“We were really disappointed. You’re used to things like this happening from Mother Nature on Ocracoke, but not from human error,” said Kivi Leroux Miller, who awoke in a hot rental house Thursday morning.
The Lexington, N.C., resident had to cut short her yearly vacation with her husband and two children, and they were among the last cars on a packed ferry Friday.
“There was definitely this sort of sadness with everyone having to leave,” she said.
Ocracoke and Hatteras Islands went dark Thursday when a construction company building a new bridge between islands drove a steel casing into an underground transmission line. The company, PCL Construction, was digging at the site Friday to determine the extent of the damage. Officials said it could be days or weeks before it’s fixed. A better forecast wasn’t expected for another day or so.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as generators were sent to the islands for the residents who stayed behind. Officials urged people to use power only for fans and refrigerators.
“The situation is stabilizing today thanks to the use of additional portable generators,” Cooper said.
The islands, which have about 5,000 permanent residents, rely heavily on the summer tourist season for their local economies.
“In a seasonal community like Ocracoke, there’s three to five months out of the year when most businesses are closed,” said Jason Wells, owner of Jason’s Restaurant on Ocracoke Island. “So when you take this hit in July and factor in that you’re only open eight months out of the year, it’s big. It’s a lot more than people even realize.”
Wells said his restaurant, closed by the outage, is missing out on between $5,000 and $6,000 a day in sales. His 25 workers typically make between $75 and $250 a day.