County annual report · FIPS 37111
2019 McDowell County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2019, customers in McDowell County, NC went without power for an average of 13.6 hours, a total of 169K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.9 hours). That ranks 43rd worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 386th of 2,945 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2018
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in McDowell County, 2019
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | January 13, 2019 06:00 | January 14, 2019 03:15 | 21h 15m | 2,530 | 14K |
| 2 | April 26, 2019 18:15 | April 28, 2019 02:30 | 1d 8h | 2,338 | 28K |
| 3 | August 22, 2019 18:15 | August 24, 2019 06:30 | 1d 12h | 2,297 | 13K |
| 4 | July 17, 2019 18:45 | July 18, 2019 09:15 | 14h 30m | 2,114 | 21K |
| 5 | July 12, 2019 14:00 | July 13, 2019 06:00 | 16h | 1,595 | 6,433 |
| 6 | February 24, 2019 18:45 | February 25, 2019 21:15 | 1d 2h | 1,427 | 13K |
| 7 | February 5, 2019 17:00 | February 5, 2019 20:45 | 3h 45m | 1,261 | 985 |
| 8 | December 10, 2019 01:30 | December 10, 2019 07:45 | 6h 15m | 1,145 | 4,895 |
| 9 | June 18, 2019 01:45 | June 19, 2019 10:00 | 1d 8h | 1,036 | 2,318 |
| 10 | October 27, 2019 04:30 | October 27, 2019 19:30 | 15h | 950 | 4,352 |
Outage episodes by size in 2019: 49 reached 100+ customers, 9 reached 1,000+ customers, 0 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 McDowell County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2019, 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) | 2018 | 43.0 hrs | 2.71 | 2.6 hrs | 1.33 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2018 | 13.1 hrs | 1.81 | 3.7 hrs | 1.19 |
| Rutherford Elec Member Corp | 2018 | 6.8 hrs | 1.63 | 1.9 hrs | 0.82 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| French Broad 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 90% of North Carolina's customers in 2019; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 12,442 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. McDowell County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), McDowell County, NC annual power outage report, 2019, 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/2019/north-carolina/mcdowell-county