County annual report · FIPS 37039
2020 Cherokee County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Cherokee County, NC went without power for an average of 20.1 hours, a total of 325K customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 37th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 425th of 3,019 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2019
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Cherokee County, 2020
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 29, 2020 03:00 | November 1, 2020 17:15 | 3d 14h | 6,600 | 95K |
| 2 | April 9, 2020 02:30 | April 10, 2020 04:15 | 1d 1h | 5,041 | 36K |
| 3 | January 11, 2020 14:15 | January 13, 2020 19:45 | 2d 5h | 4,569 | 57K |
| 4 | August 6, 2020 16:45 | August 6, 2020 21:45 | 5h | 2,685 | 2,234 |
| 5 | August 23, 2020 10:45 | August 23, 2020 19:15 | 8h 30m | 2,576 | 4,032 |
| 6 | October 22, 2020 16:45 | October 22, 2020 17:15 | 30m | 2,397 | 600 |
| 7 | October 22, 2020 18:30 | October 22, 2020 18:45 | 15m | 2,397 | 599 |
| 8 | April 16, 2020 12:00 | April 16, 2020 16:30 | 4h 30m | 2,063 | 5,672 |
| 9 | January 14, 2020 05:15 | January 14, 2020 08:45 | 3h 30m | 2,048 | 6,905 |
| 10 | April 12, 2020 22:45 | April 13, 2020 22:45 | 1d | 1,901 | 12K |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 85 reached 100+ customers, 22 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 Cherokee County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2020, 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 Carolinas, LLC | 2020 | 11.2 hrs | 1.71 | 3.1 hrs | 1.18 |
| Blue Ridge Mountain EMC - (GA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Tri-State Electric Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Murphy - (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 91% of North Carolina's customers in 2020; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 16,160 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. Cherokee County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Cherokee County, NC annual power outage report, 2020, 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/2020/north-carolina/cherokee-county