Residents of Charlotte neighborhood frustrated over ‘monthly’ blackouts

CHARLOTTE, NC — The electricity and patience are out in the Chantilly neighborhood. A group of neighbors on Katie Strimaitis’ home all tell a similar story.

“People have been flooding me with the stories of years and years of no electricity,” said Strimaitis.

Neighbors say the outage texts from Duke Energy is a common occurrences. Going on to say they get them about once a month.

“It’s the same text message. Every time power goes off. Trees fallen, trees fallen,” said Strimaitis.

It’s not just trees causing problems. Ring video shows sparks flying near David Steadman’s detached garage.

“There are exposed copper wires that run along the power line, and they’re not insulated at all. So when the wind blows, they clap together and they rain sparks down on our backyard,” explained Steadman.

Steadman worries for his families safety.

“We have our son, who’s ten, he plays back there our dogs out there,” Steadman said.

Health and safety is what frightens 78-year-old Jane Escher who lives with COPD.

“I have to use my nebulizer to get my medicine in me. No power, no nebulizer. My neighbor, who’s 80, has to sleep with a sleep apnea machine. No power, no sleep apnea machine,” explained Escher.

In a statement, Duke Energy writes:

“When we put in lines and poles decades ago we used to put those in customer backyards. As Charlotte has grown up around these neighborhoods, we now install lines different ways than we did years ago. Much of that ‘backlot’ infrastructure still exists in older Charlotte neighborhoods and those small trees from years ago have become large trees. Despite ongoing maintenance so we frequently see vegetation-related outages when backyard tree branches fall on lines. Chantilly is an older Charlotte neighborhood and still has that backlot infrastructure. In 2025, the circuit that serves Chantilly (as a whole) has experienced two outages. Both were tree/vegetation-related. Beyond that, there have been blinks or shorter duration outages that customers have experienced. More than half of these are also related to trees and vegetation.

Trees and vegetation are our number one leading cause of outages system-wide. This is especially true in the greater Charlotte area where we have a very lush tree canopy. As part of providing reliable service and minimizing outages, it is important that Duke Energy maintains trees and other vegetation along power lines, and as part of that we trim our circuits on a regular basis.

We have upcoming improvement work planned for Chantilly which will focus on newer technologies that will limit outage duration.”