Roxboro Food Lion forced to throw away food during power outage
Power is slowly coming back on for businesses and thousands of people north of the Triangle after Saturday's ice storm.
On Tuesday morning, Duke Energy reported nearly 3,000 customers without power across Person, Granville and Vance Counties. The number was closer to 10,000 on Monday night.
Employees at a Food Lion store in Roxboro told WRAL News they lost food during the power outage and had to scramble to salvage what they could onto cold storage trucks.
Ice cream and many other cold items were thrown out before power was restored Tuesday morning.
Residents in Person County who have been without power for days were struggling to stay warm. At a Sheetz gas station on Monday, Caleb Cook was filling plastic containers with gas for a generator at home in the Timberlake community. The power went out for him around noon on Saturday.
"It's been pretty rough because I'm in college, and we're doing online stuff, so I have no WiFi, or power or anything," explained Cook.
Charles Rowland also spent Monday fueling up for his generator.
"[It] was one of the worst one's I've seen in a long time, and I've been here for 57 years," said Rowland about the ice storm.
He added that it could be Thursday before his lights come back on.
On Franklin Street, Reubena Whitted saw the power return late Monday morning after more than 24 hours in the dark.
Large tree limbs toppled into yards up and down her street.
"Things are still falling," she said. "It's still pretty dangerous.
Whitted said the sound of branches cracking under the weight of ice was constant through the weekend.
"It sounded like fireworks," she added.
As power crews worked and residents waited, My Life Matters ministry director Brett Carver Brett Carver opened his building to people who needed showers and a warm place to stay.
"We opened up our building [and] got the heat going. We invited anybody from the community who wanted to come in [or] needed a hot place to stay. Come on in -- we had pancakes this morning," he said.
Hundreds of customers across large swaths of rural areas are still waiting for the power to return, but Duke Energy and Piedmont Electric Co-Op crews are working around the clock.
