Kroger said Butler County was the "ground zero" for damage. On Monday night, there were more than 49,000 Duke energy customers without power. The county's next largest provider, Butler Rural Electric Cooperative, had 3,100 customers lose power. The City of Hamilton serves most of its own residents and announced at 8 p.m. Wednesday all power had been restored. But for Duke Energy, the primary focus after any major outage is to restore the power "... to public health and safety facilities, and to get the greatest number of customers back online as safely and quickly as possible," Kroger said. Duke Energy then prioritizes repairing transmission lines and then distribution lines, Kroger said. Transmission lines carry electricity from powerplants to substations, where the distribution lines then carry electricity from the substation to the consumer. "In an outage as significant as this, we had crews working on [transmission lines and distribution lines] simultaneously," Kroger said.