ROCKINGHAM — More than 3,000 homes and businesses in the Rockingham area went dark, just before it got dark, Monday evening.
According to the Duke Energy outage map, at 8:50 p.m. there were eight outages in the city — and parts of East Rockingham — affecting 3,775 customers.
The outages stretch out on the east and west sides of U.S. 220, just north of Haywood Cemetery Road and across the river into Anson County.
The map also shows an outage in the Cordova area.
Neither the Rockingham police or fire departments currently know the reason for the outage.
The estimated time of restoration is 1 a.m. Tuesday. Some power was reportedly back on in downtown Rockingham just before 9:30 p.m.
But that’s not the only energy issue in Richmond County.
Residents are lining up at gas stations to fill up their tanks following a weekend cyber-attack on a pipeline.
The Speedway station in Rockingham had customers backed into the road. The Speedway in Hamlet was out out of gas by 9:25 p.m.
Plastic bags covered the pump handles at the Circle K on N.C. 177.
Stations in downtown Rockingham were shut down due to the power outage.
Several other stations were reportedly out.
Many on social media castigated panic-buyers, saying there wouldn’t be a shortage if they just bought gas normally, as needed.
Multiple news outlets report that Colonial Pipeline, which carries around half the fuel consumed by the East Coast, had to shut down more than 5,000 miles of its system and plans to be operational by the end of the week.
