Hundreds of homes and businesses across the northern and western parts of the Triangle remained without power Monday evening after a winter storm blasted the region with snow for a second day.
Statewide, Duke Energy reported about 67,500 customers without power as of 5 p.m., which was down significantly from Monday morning, when outages were more than double that number.
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Rural portions of the Triangle experienced the majority of outages in the region, with snow-laden trees pulling down power lines as they fell. Granville County still had close to 1,300 outages as of 5 p.m., while Orange County was about 1,000 and Chatham County was about 400.
Chatham County had about 2,600 outages on Monday morning, and the snow hampered efforts to repair snapped power poles.
Alex Pegerson had part of a tree fall on the roof of his Farrington Road home, leaving his family in the dark for several hours.
"The snow can make a limb fall down like that, it's just crazy," Pegerson said. "I was sitting in the back room and, all of a sudden, I just heard a huge boom, and I thought a whole tree fell on our house. As soon as we came outside, that limb was just sitting there."
The house was pretty cold until the power returned, he said, thanking the power crews for their hard work.
Neighboring Orange County likewise had more than 2,000 customers without power on Monday morning, and Duke Energy and Piedmont Electric Membership crews worked quickly to bring that number down.
Brian Tapp said an outage doesn't stop the work at his farm along New Hope Church Road, near Hillsborough.
"Things still have to be done. Animals still have to be fed. Chickens still have to be fed [and] eggs collected. All that good stuff still has to be done," Tapp said. "It would be nice if you could curl up in a ball in front of a fireplace, but you got to get out in it and keep the fires going in the home front."