Duke Energy Faces Extensive Repairs from Sunday’s High Winds

PLAINFIELD, IND. - High winds from Hurricane Ike rolled through Indiana Sunday night and knocked out power to nearly 300,000 Duke Energy Indiana customers. The company had about 110,000 customers out of service as of Monday morning.

Winds up to 75 miles per hour caused extensive damage to the power infrastructure, resulting in outages in virtually every district of the state. The hardest hit areas of Clarksville, Seymour, Connersville, Corydon, Madison, Bedford and Bloomington could experience outages into Saturday. Customers in Huntington, Wabash, Brazil, Terre Haute, Greencastle, Lafayette, and Kokomo should be restored to service today. The estimated restoration time for Clinton, Martinsville, Plainfield, Sullivan, Carmel, Noblesville, and Franklin is Tuesday.

“This may be the most significant storm our company has ever experienced in Indiana in terms of number of customers affected at the peak,” said Duke Energy Indiana President Jim Stanley. “I also can’t recall another storm where we’ve had so many individual cases of trouble, which makes power restoration slower-going. Many of the outages are from trees or branches falling into power lines. We’re urging people to avoid downed power lines and not to try and remove trees or debris near those lines.”

Duke Energy’s Indiana operations provide approximately 7,300 megawatts of safe, reliable and competitively priced electricity to more than 780,000 electric customers, making it the state’s largest electric supplier.

Duke Energy, one of the largest electric power companies in the United States, supplies and delivers electricity to approximately 4 million U.S. customers in its regulated jurisdictions. The company has approximately 35,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity in the Midwest and the Carolinas, and natural gas distribution services in Ohio and Kentucky. In addition, Duke Energy has more than 4,000 megawatts of electric generation in Latin America, and is a joint-venture partner in a U.S. real estate company.