This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
This Website Uses Cookies
By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn More
This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
Subscribe
  • Sign In
  • Create Account
  • Sign Out
  • My Account
  • Projects
    • Buildings
    • Construction Methods
    • Design
    • Sustainability
    • Transportation
    • Environment
    • Power & Industrial
    • Water & Dams
    • Best Projects
  • Business
    • Safety & Health
    • Workforce
    • Finance
    • Companies
    • Project Delivery
    • Ethics & Corruption
    • Government
    • Risk
    • Pulse
    • Contractor Business Strategy
  • Talent
    • Awards
      • Top 25 Newsmakers
      • Award of Excellence
      • Legacy Award
    • Promotions & New Hires
    • Obituaries
    • Annual Photo Contest
  • Regions
    • ENR California
    • ENR MidAtlantic
    • ENR Midwest
    • ENR Mountain States
    • ENR New York
    • ENR New England
    • ENR Northwest
    • ENR Southeast
    • ENR Southwest
    • ENR Texas & Louisiana
    • Regional Contests and Surveys
  • Tech
    • Information Technology
    • Construction Technology
    • BIM
  • Products
    • Equipment
    • Materials
    • Product Snapshot
  • Ideas
    • Blogs
    • Editorials
    • Viewpoints
    • Letters
    • Book Reviews
  • Costs
    • Construction Economics Archive
    • Historical Indices
    • Quarterly Cost Reports
    • FAQs
  • Lists
    • ENR Top Lists
    • ENR Sourcebooks
    • Survey Schedule
    • 2019 Top 100/400/500 Survey
    • 2018 Top 600 Specialty Contractors Survey
    • 2018 Top International Survey
    • 2018 Top 200 Environmental Firms Survey
  • CE Center
  • InfoCenters
    • The Business of Projects
    • Revolutionizing Productivity Safety
  • Events
    • AEC BuildTech
    • Award of Excellence
    • Best of the Best Project Awards
    • Engineering Management Training
    • FutureTech
    • Groundbreaking Women in Construction
    • Global Best Projects Awards
    • Port Authority of NY & NJ
    • Regional Best Projects
    • Top 25 Newsmakers
    • Upcoming Events
    • Webinars
  • More
    • Subscription
    • Proposals & Bids
    • Industry Jobs
    • Special Reports
    • Sponsor Insights
    • Store
    • Videos
    • Interactive Spotlights
    • Digital Editions
    • Photo Galleries
    • Special Advertising Sections
  • About
    • Contact
    • Advertise
Home » Carolina Utilities Assess Florence Infrastructure Damage
EnvironmentPower & IndustrialWater & DamsSoutheast Construction NewsGovernmentRisk

Carolina Utilities Assess Florence Infrastructure Damage

Dukepower

Power workers examine damage from a fallen tree in North Carolina.

Photo Courtesy of Duke Energy.

Carolinas_Map_ENR_Webready3

PowerOutage.us collects, records, and aggregates live power outage data from utilities all over the United States with the goal to create the single most reliable and complete source of power outage information available. This snapshot of data from the evening of Sept. 16 shows the power distribution status of North and South Carolina as of that time. Maps by PowerOutage.us 

Dukepower
Carolinas_Map_ENR_Webready3
September 21, 2018
Pam Radtke Russell and Debra K. Rubin
KEYWORDS CFPUA / electricity / Flooding / hog farm pollution / Hurricane Florence / Transmission / wastewater flooding
Reprints
No Comments

Story was updated on Sept. 21, 1:00 PM EST

As flooding spread in the Carolinas one week after Hurricane Florence made landfall in eastern North Carolina, utility crews still pushed to restore power and maintain clean water supply.

Duke Energy said on Sept. 20 that about 49,000 power customers remained without power in the Carolinas, down from about 450,000  in North Carolina alone on Sept. 17, primarily in the hardest hit areas along the coast.  It expects full power restoration by late on Sept. 26.

Florence_aftermath_icon.png“We do have quite a bit of infrastructure damage resulting in outages. Transmission lines, substations, poles,” says Candice Knezevic, a Duke Energy spokeswoman. “Catastrophic flooding and extensive damage have prevented crews from getting to the hardest-hit areas.”

Most state outages were Duke customers, but about 150,000 ere customers of smaller cooperatives that get their power from Duke. A damaged transmission line that serves at least one of the cooperatives is preventing power from being restored for those customers.

Duke is moving additional crews to eastern North Carolina to repair major transmission lines, Knezevic says. She says there are 20,000 lineworkers working in the state and that Duke has restored more power to more than 1.2 million customers. Just about 9,000 outages are being reported in South Carolina. 

Water-Wastewater Service Challenged

Florence’s landfall in its large service area proved daunting for the Wilmington-based Cape Fear Public Utility Authority (CFPUA), which has at least 67,000 water customer accounts and more than 65,000 customers for wastewater treatment, with the utility noting about 200,000 people served and 1,000 miles each of water distribution mains and sewer mains.

CFPUA warned customers early on Sept. 16 of fuel shortages that were about to shut down water service but by mid-day it had secured sufficient alternative supply. 

In a Sept. 20 report on its website, CFPUA said its drinking water plants and groundwater well system had remained fully operational during Florence with its Sweeney and Richardson plants and Monterey Heights well system producing and distributing more than 75 million gallons of safe drinking water during the storm.

However, Columbia, SC-based contractor M.B. Kahn Construction Co. Inc. told ENR that continued flooding of the Cape Fear River has prevented teams from damage assessment access to the site of its $1.4-million reverse osmosis treatment facility under construction at the Sweeney plant in Wilmington, possibly until about Sept 24, according to Bill Edmonds, executive vice president of its waterworks division. The project is set for completion next March.

The firm also said flooding in Fayetteville was hampering assessment of two other projects there but that 6 projects on the coast in Georgetown, Charleston, Beaufort, SC and Savannah, Ga. were not affected significantly. 

Issues were more problematic on the wastewater side, with CFPUA noting impacts to facilities located at lower elevations.

Said CFPUA on it website Sept 20:  "As expected, CFPUA’s wastewater system bore the brunt of the storm. We lost power to most of our 148 pump stations at some point during the storm, requiring emergency generators. Commercial power has been restored to many stations, but many remain on a generator."

With the power losses, backup equipment failure and flooding, the utility confirmed “we experienced 21 sewer releases, including one at our Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant," where 5.25 million gallons of partially treated wastewater were released into the Cape Fear River.

CFPUA said "releases of this size are not uncommon during extreme storms, adding that "the increased environmental impact ... is expected to be minimal because of the excessive rainfall and flooding conditions. Nonetheless, we will learn from this event and make our systems even more robust and reliable."

But the Associated Press reported on Sept. 20 that rising water at the Northwest Regional Water Reclamation Facility in Richlands  "devastated" the plant, according to utility CEO Jeff Hudson, damaging electrical equipment for operations. He says partially-treated wastewater then mixed with floodwater but there was no contamination from hazardous chemicals at the plant.

Hudson was unclear how long repairs will take and the status of funds for new resilience measures. 

But flooding has caused 21 hog waste impoundments to overflow in North Carolina, creating a contamination risk to standing water, said the state Dept. of Environmental Quality. It said four waste lagoons had structural damage and 55 were full or nearly full.

Coal-ash Sites Monitored

Also at risk are coal ash ponds at power plant sites. Duke is already repairing damage to oneat the Sutton Power Plant, near Wilmington that displaced about 2,000 cu yd of coal ash.

According to Duke spokeswoman Dawn Santoianni, Duke has identified a berm erosion as the reason for the release of coal ash and water at the plant. A second area of coal ash, about 25 ft by 100 ft, washed off the plant property and onto a nearby industrial site.

There were other areas of erosion at the site, but Duke says it believes most ash remained within its property. Inspections have not shown that any of the ash flowed into the Cape Fear River or nearby Sutton lake, Santoianni says.

Utility Santee Cooper is watching how close the still rising Waccamaw River in South Carolina gets to what the Charlotte Observer said was 200,000 tons of coal ash at a former power plant site in Conway.

Separately, an “unusual event” was declared at Duke Energy’s Brunswick nuclear plant in Wilmington because the roads to and from the plant are flooded, says Joey Ledford, a spokesman for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plant itself is not flooded and water is not near the plant, he says.

The plant was shut down in advance of the storm, a standard procedure for nuclear plants before a major storm. Because of the flooding, employees could not get in or out of the plant for a while. But Knezevic says the workers at the plant are not stranded and now can get in and out of the site.

Ledford said to his knowledge, this is the first time the site has flooded.

“Most of the roads around Wilmington are impassable,” he says. “It’s impossible to get around in personal vehicles."

ENR Subscribe

Recent Articles by Pam Radtke Russell

Puerto Rico Utility Proposes Eight Minigrids to Run the Island

Katrina Flooded a Kids' Museum. Now They're Building Back for Resiliency.

New Fallout Hits Creditors In PG&E Battle

Pamela-russell

Senior Editor Pam Radtke Russell is a New Orleans-based journalist with more than a decade covering energy and environmental issues for ENR, Platts, CQ Roll Call in Washington D.C. and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. She was part of the Times-Picayune team that worked from Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina and was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism in 2006 for public service and breaking news.

Debra-k-rubin1

As ENR Editor-at-Large for Management, Business and Workforce, Debra K. Rubin has a broad vantage for news, issues and trends in global engineering, architecture and construction—from corporate finance and executive management to regulation and risk, next-generation workforce and developing markets such as offshore wind energy.

Debra also launched and manages ENR's Top 200 Environmental Firms ranking, which defines a $51-billion global market; is editor of ENR WorkforceToday e-newsletter on industry talent management; and supervises content for the popular Industry Buzz page, which leads ENR’s monthly Contractor Business Strategy report. She also is an organizer of ENR's annual Groundbreaking Women in Construction conference, a major forum for women's career issues in construction.

Click here for more detail on the 2019 conference now in formation.

Debra's reporting for ENR on the 2001 Ground Zero attack damage, response and recovery earned a Jesse B. Neal award from B2B media giant Connectiv and is featured in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.

Related Articles

New Fallout Hits Creditors In PG&E Battle

SNC-Lavalin Grows Europe Base As Corporate Pressures Mount

Changed Plan for $1B NYC Subway Tunnel Rehab May Avoid Shutdown, But Questions Remain

Post a comment to this article

Report Abusive Comment

Subscription Center!
  • Print Edition Subscriptions
  • Digital Edition Subscriptions
  • eNewsletter Subscriptions
  • Online Registration
  • Subscription Customer Service
  • Connect with ENR

More Videos

Popular Stories

Debbie Skrynski

ENR's 2018 Construction Photography Contest Winners

SR99tunnel.jpg

Weekend of Events Precedes Seattle Tunnel Opening

Trump Issues New 'Buy American' Directive for Infrastructure Projects

French-influenced legal approach

How Texas' Uncommon Law Is Different on Design Defects

VAInfrastructure_495EntranceDay.jpg

Virginia Launches $1B in I-95, Capital Beltway Projects

Industry Jobs



ENR Proposals and Bids

Events

March 21, 2019

ENR's Award of Excellence

On March 21, 2019, hundreds of your colleagues will gather at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers in New York City for ENR's 54th Annual Award of Excellence Black-Tie Gala. Just like past events, in 2019 you will have the opportunity to network with more than 1,000 construction leaders and make critical connections, while joining us to celebrate the Top 25 Newsmakers for their achievements in 2018 and be inspired by the Award of Excellence Winner.
April 30, 2019

AEC BuildTech

Join us for the inaugural AEC BuildTech Conference & Expo!

View All Submit An Event

Products

2019 BNi Green Building Square Foot Costbook

2019 BNi Green Building Square Foot Costbook

See More Products

Special Ad Section

ABA Forum On Construction Law
  ABA Forum On Construction Law
 View all Special Ad Sections
 Archives

 


ENR

ENR February 18, 2019 cover

Feb 18, 2019

Multiple contractors work around dangerous tides and typhoons to build a fast-track network of bridges, interchanges and roadways that will connect economically important islands in the East China Sea south of Shanghai.

View More Subscribe
  • Resources
    • advertise
    • contact us
    • about us
    • photo submissions
    • customer service
    • digital edition
    • Survey And Sample
  • Subscription Center
    • Subscribe
    • Website Registration
    • Privacy Policy
    • eNewsletters
    • FAQ
  • Multimedia
    • Videos
    • Slideshows
    • Reader Photos
    • Photo Contest

Copyright ©2019. All Rights Reserved BNP Media.

Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing