We work hard day in and day out to keep electricity flowing to your home or business, but as we have seen with past hurricanes, Mother Nature can dash those efforts.

During a major outage, our main goal is to restore power to the greatest number of members in the shortest time possible, but we will not jeopardize the safety of the response teams or the public. 

Everyone should be prepared to go without power for several days depending on the severity of the damages. Once it is safe, crews begin a methodical restoration effort. Here's how it works:

• Transmission towers and lines supply power to our substations. Thousands of people are served by one high-voltage transmission line. Damage to this equipment  gets attention first.
• Next, we monitor our 17 substations, from Atlantic in down east Carteret County to Maysville to the west in Jones County. Problems in a distribution substation could be caused by failure in the transmission system supplying the substation or damage inside the substation itself.  If the problem can be corrected at the substation level, power may be restored to a large number of people.
• Main distribution lines are checked next. These lines carry electricity away from the substation to a group of consumers, such as a town or housing development. When power is restored here, all members served by this line could see the lights come on. 
• Next we inspect tap lines, which are the lines that carry power to the utility poles or underground transformers outside houses or other buildings. 
• Individual services are typically the last lines we work since outages here impact the least number of members. No matter how extensive the damage or how long the outage, someone is going to be the last in line to have power restored.

Sometimes you may see a CCEC truck drive through an area, and then move on. This happens when the work requires more equipment or additional crew members. Other times, a tree crew may be needed to remove fallen branches before line repairs can begin. We ask that you please be patient. We are working as quickly and as safely as possible to restore power to all members.

Power out? Stay connected!

We want you to know that you don’t need to call as soon as your lights go out during widespread outages.
CCEC has a substation monitoring system that indicates when and where outages occur, as well as an automated metering infrastructure (AMI) system that send us a signal when the power goes out at each meter.

Before reporting an outage, check the outage map at outage.carteretcraven.coop and your breakers. If lights come on around you and yours don’t, call us at 252.247.3107.

Sign up for outage notifications by texting "CCEMC" to 1.800.682.2217. Text “OUT” to report your outage and “STATUS” for restoration progress.