Power Outages Take Uptown Charlotte By Surprise

November 1, 2004
Centre Daily

Most of downtown Charlotte lost power briefly on Monday, but spokesmen for Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp. said neither company had significant business interruptions.

About 4,800 commercial and residential customers lost power for about 30 minutes earlier Monday afternoon due to a problem at a Duke Power substation, said Valerie Patterson, a spokeswoman for the Duke Energy Corp. utility serving North Carolina.

"The exact cause is under investigation," Patterson said, adding that 4,800 customers constitutes a "pretty widespread" outage downtown.

Duke Energy's corporate headquarters was among businesses at least one block north of the outage area and, therefore, didn't lose power.

Founder's Hall, Bank of America's 64-story corporate headquarters, and the Hearst Tower, which houses the company's 550-employee trading floor, were affected by the outage, company spokesman Terry Francisco said.

However, he said, "All the backup systems we have related to data and the trading operations worked as planned, so we did not have any interference to our financial operations."

A Wachovia spokesman said he was aware of no outages or disruptions at its complex, which is about three blocks away from Bank of America's headquarters.

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