North Carolina has been hit by a string of power outages throughout July 2026, driven by a combination of severe storms and dangerous heat.
On July 20, thunderstorms knocked out power to the entire city of Washington, NC for several hours. On July 23, heavy rain triggered flooding and thousands of outages across central NC, including about 2,000 customers in Durham and 2,500 in Chatham County, with more than 6 inches of rain recorded in High Point. A separate storm, combined with record heat, knocked out power for over 1,000 people in Raleigh and additional customers in Durham and Morrisville — one outage traced to a transformer fire — prompting emergency cooling centers to open across the region.
As of today, live outage trackers show a few thousand customers still without power statewide, concentrated in Rowan and Surry counties, out of the roughly 5.8 million customers served across North Carolina.
While most of these outages have been resolved within hours to about a day, the repeated pattern throughout the month reflects a broader trend: aging infrastructure and increasingly severe summer storms are putting real strain on power grids across the country this year.
⚡ In this video:
A timeline of North Carolina’s outages this July
What’s been causing them (storms, heat, and infrastructure strain)
How local communities have responded
What this means for grid reliability going forward
#NorthCarolina #PowerOutage #Storms #WeatherNews #DukeEnergy
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