County annual report · FIPS 37047
2016 Columbus County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2016, customers in Columbus County, NC went without power for an average of 79.2 hours, a total of 1.8M customer-hours (North Carolina average 30.5 hours). That ranks 15th worst of 93 North Carolina counties and 27th of 2,391 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2015
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Columbus County, 2016
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 8, 2016 22:30 | October 22, 2016 08:45 | 13d 10h | 28,403 | 1.7M |
| 2 | June 22, 2016 21:15 | June 23, 2016 04:15 | 7h | 3,859 | 972 |
| 3 | September 2, 2016 17:45 | September 3, 2016 18:45 | 1d 1h | 3,712 | 30K |
| 4 | July 7, 2016 22:45 | July 8, 2016 04:00 | 5h 15m | 3,329 | 2,930 |
| 5 | September 10, 2016 18:15 | September 10, 2016 21:15 | 3h | 3,124 | 4,510 |
| 6 | November 26, 2016 07:00 | November 26, 2016 09:30 | 2h 30m | 2,978 | 7,238 |
| 7 | October 8, 2016 08:00 | October 8, 2016 17:45 | 9h 45m | 2,009 | 9,524 |
| 8 | July 15, 2016 20:00 | July 16, 2016 04:30 | 8h 30m | 1,811 | 1,723 |
| 9 | September 7, 2016 01:30 | September 7, 2016 02:30 | 1h | 1,759 | 1,758 |
| 10 | June 14, 2016 21:45 | June 15, 2016 09:15 | 11h 30m | 1,658 | 3,621 |
Outage episodes by size in 2016: 53 reached 100+ customers, 15 reached 1,000+ customers, 1 reached 10,000+ customers.
Utility reliability filed with the EIA
SAIDI (average outage time per customer) and SAIFI (average interruptions per customer) that utilities serving Columbus County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2016, or their most recent earlier filing. Utility-wide figures, not county-specific.
| Utility | EIA year | SAIDI | SAIFI | SAIDI excl. major events | SAIFI excl. major events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duke Energy Progress - (NC) | 2016 | 63.5 hrs | 3.55 | 3.0 hrs | 1.63 |
| Brunswick Electric Member Corp | 2016 | 19.4 hrs | 2.57 | 36 min | 0.64 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Four County Elec Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about n/a of North Carolina's customers in 2016; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 22,736 customers (ORNL modeled county customer count), including major storm days. It is comparable across counties but is not the SAIDI a utility files.
- An outage event is a continuous stretch with customers out; counts at 100, 1,000 and 10,000+ use its peak.
- Years loaded: 2015–2025. Columbus County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Columbus County, NC annual power outage report, 2016, data as of Oct 3, 2026 02:41 UTC, sources: DOE EAGLE-I (https://eagle-i.doe.gov/); EAGLE-I modeled customer counts (MCC) (https://figshare.com/); EIA Form 861 (utility reliability) (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/). https://massoutage.com/reports/2016/north-carolina/columbus-county