ASHEVILLE -- Gilles Cloutier would not be denied his Christmas Day dinner.
When an ice storm hit western North Carolina on Friday, thousands of residents were left in the dark.
Cloutier, who lives in nearby Black Mountain, had a turkey to cook and people who wanted to eat it, so he got creative.
"It's hard to cook a turkey when you don't have electricity," Cloutier said.
"We went to a restaurant in Black Mountain and used their oven so we could roast the turkey and then used the charcoal grill to cook some other stuff.
"It was very cozy," he said. "We had a candlelight dinner (Friday) night with three families."
Candlelight remains the lone means of light for some in the North Carolina mountains.
Progress Energy reported 2,403 customers in eastern Buncombe County were without power Sunday morning following Friday's storm.
At the peak of the storm Friday there were more than 12,250 Progress Energy customers without power in western North Carolina, spokeswoman Martha Thompson said.
Hardest hit were the area along N.C. 9 south of Black Mountain and the communities of Garren Creek and Broad River, Thompson said.
"Clearly those areas were much harder hit with severe damage," she said. "It was like a war zone. We have dozens of broken poles and feeder lines on the ground."
Problems also linger in northwestern North Carolina, where Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corp. Saturday that massive damage from fallen trees, downed power lines and broken utility poles will keep people without heat and light into Tuesday.
Blue Ridge Electric has brought in an additional an additional 107 line technicians from other cooperatives and companies to assist its crews.
The utility reported on its Web site late Sunday afternoon there were 5,100 customers without power in Watauga County and another 960 customers in Ashe County.
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