The biggest challenges are fallen trees and washed out roads, which limit access to the power lines. More: Helene in Western North Carolina ... on the specific outage. A new map on Duke's website ...

Power is slowly but surely being restored in Rutherford County. At its peak, outages topped 1.1 million. Thousands of line workers are pulling 16-hour days working around the clock to get power ...

At the Buncombe County press briefing on the morning of Oct. 8, County Manager Avril Pinder reviewed progress in electricity restoration from Duke Energy, the biggest electricity provider in the state ...