Power restored in Smithfield after town-wide outage

According to a spokesperson from the Town of Smithfield, 70 percent of the town was without power for hours, including the Carolina Premium Outlets and most of downtown.

Power was restored by 10:45 a.m. Officials said a breaker failure at the North Hospital Road substation caused the outage.

Johnston Memorial Hospital was running on a backup power supply.

According to the town's public utilities page, Smithfield is a "public power community," meaning utilities are locally controlled by the town.

Unlike of much of North Carolina, which uses Duke Energy, Smithfield is a member of the North Carolina Eastern Municipal Power Association.

"The Public Utilities Department always strives to provide the best service possible," a statement on the website read. "Our electric system reliability is constantly at 99.9 percent, and when problems do arise, crews respond in minutes."

Several callers told WRAL News they awoke to a "loud boom" around the time of the outage.

Freddy Smith, who lives less than a mile from the power substation, said he woke right up when he heard what sounded like heavy thunder.