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Some people got to sleep in this morning when alarm clocks didn’t alarm at the right time. Others got awakened in the middle of the night by electronic equipment that “chirps” during a power outage.

A Progress Energy power outage left about 1300 customers without electricity between 1:43 and 6:03am.

“Pole failure,” was the cause, according to Jeff Brooks, a spokesman for the Raleigh-based electric company. A pole that supported one of Progress Energy’s feeder lines split. That affected 1,311 households that relied on the feeder line, which runs between Stonewall and Oriental.

Twenty-two customers had power restored just before 3am. 1,289 others were back on line at jut after 6am.

Brooks says the pole that broke was around the 16000 block of Highway 55, which puts it in Stonewall.

Brooks says there was no indication that a car had hit the pole.

Sometimes, however, the wooden poles become weakened by storms and later break. Brooks says that the utility spends time on pole maintenance to try to prevent that from happening.

Posted Tuesday October 7, 2008 by Melinda Penkava