News and Notes

Helene’s Historic Devastation Spurs Largest-Ever Mutual Aid Response, Signals Power Sector Reckoning

Electric cooperatives across the Southeast describe Hurricane Helene’s devastation as vast and unprecedented, warning that restoring some crucial infrastructure serving the not-for-profit entities’ customers will take a long and arduous process.

In a call with reporters on Oct. 1—five days after the massive Category 4 storm made landfall—co-op leaders serving customers in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina detailed the extensive damage to their systems. While the storm slowly weakened as it moved north across the Deep South and then northwestward across the southern Appalachians, the storms heavy rain and intense winds left a trail of destruction on power infrastructure, with thousands of broken poles, flooded roads, and some cases, utterly devastated electrical systems.

Duke Energy, an investor-owned utility, and Tennessee Valley Authority, a public power entity, reported similar devastation. In total, Helene is estimated to have affected nearly 6 million customers in 10 states. 

Power Infrastructure Devastation: ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’

Relying heavily on mutual aid, the power providers continue to work doggedly toward restoration, appealing to frustrated customers for patience. For rural co-ops, challenges have been compounded by the remote and rugged nature of their service territories. 

“This storm has been historic proportions in terms of its depth and breadth of magnitude,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of trade group National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “In the 87-year history of electric cooperatives, we’ve never seen something like this in some of our service territories.” Power restoration “could take days, weeks in some cases, because of the location and the amount of damage,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of hooking something up that happened to break apart, but really rebuilding from the ground up some of these components of the electric system.”

“It’s devastation that is hard to describe,” said Dennis Chastain, CEO of Georgia EMC. “I’ve been in this business for 38 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. One of my vice presidents, he’s been here 50 years, he’s an ex-lineman, and he’s never seen anything like it either.” Chastain said his co-op system experienced over 800 separate outage events, with 41,000 members—about 30% of the total—out of power at the peak. Flooded roads and downed trees made it extremely difficult for crews to access many affected areas.

The devastation has left a trail of 2,000 knocked-down poles in South Carolina, within the territory of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. “We’re having to rebuild a lot of it,” said Mike Couick, CEO of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. “It’s not a restoration, it’s a rebuild,” he underscored. “And every one of my co-ops in this state were affected.”

In Florida, where the storm made landfall, Julius Hackett, CEO of Tri-County Electric Co-op, reported over 700 broken poles and 12,300 meters still out of service. More than 2,000 line workers and vegetation management professionals were on the scene, he said.  “We feel really good about the restoration rate. It’s a little slower than we would like when we compare it to the other hurricanes, but at Category 4, you know, we’re seeing a significant amount of damage out there that we just have to get our arms around.”

Co-op leaders expressed concern for their members, who are often located in remote and rugged service territories. Thomas Golden, CEO of EnergyUnited in North Carolina, acknowledged the severe impact on homes, roads, and infrastructure in those hard-hit regions. “Mudslides, flooding, and downed trees have made entire communities inaccessible. Crews can’t even reach some members because roads have been washed away or blocked by debris,” he said. “And when they do get through, they’re not finding a few downed lines. They’re finding entire spans of wire pulled down by trees, poles snapped in half, and infrastructure washed away by flood waters.”

In some areas, the co-op was still grappling with the tragic reality that “we still have not been able to reach some people,” he said. “Cellular service is limited in the fear and we fear the worst for some who remain accounted for the emotional toll this takes on us as a cooperative family is enormous. We serve our neighbors, our friends, our communities, and not knowing the full extent of the loss weighs heavily on every single one of us.”

The storm appears to have spared critical generation assets in its path. Chastain said his co-op in Georgia sustained damage to some solar facilities from high winds, “but in terms of our baseload generation, no damage at all to anything related generation.”

However, it tore at transmission facilities, prominently in South Carolina, affecting wholesale providers Santee Cooper and Duke Energy. Duke Energy confirmed that transmission infrastructure in upstate South Carolina was particularly hard hit and “in many cases, destroyed by wind, flooding, fallen trees, and more.” Many areas of the North Carolina mountains remain inaccessible owing to mudslides, flooding, and blocked roads, limiting the ability to assess and begin repairing damages, it said. 

Largest Mutual Aid Mobilization Ever

To support the restoration efforts, the co-ops have been shipping out massive amounts of materials. Cowlick noted they are sending out 30 trailer truckloads per day of components like transformers, cross-arms, and fuses. “We don’t have a shortage of materials. It’s not a supply chain issue, but we’re shipping out materials over the last three to four days that are about equivalent between six months and a year’s worth of material,” he said.

Matheson noted, however, that supply chain challenges could emerge in the coming days as the full scope of damage becomes clearer. “It’s not just from cooperatives, it’s from investor-owned [utilities] and munis. The demand in the utility sector for a lot of these components, we need to keep an eye on this,” he said.

Co-op leaders praised mutual aid efforts to restore power, which has streamed in to affected regions from 14 states, from as far away as South Dakota and New York. The Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a trade group representing investor-owned utilities on Wednesday said an “army of 50,000 workers from at least 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada had flooded into the region to step up the response effort.” That represents “one of the largest mutual assistance mobilizations ever,” it underscored.

And as assessments and restoration efforts continue, some entities have begun to reflect on lessons learned from the historic storm. Some co-op leaders noted they had already taken intensive measures to harden their systems to withstand extreme weather. “It just wasn’t hardened enough to deal with Helene. We faced this before with Hurricane Hugo [a historic storm that devastated areas of the Southeastern U.S. in 1989],” Cowlick said. “I’m not saying our system is fragile. It is hard, but there are events that Mother Nature throws at us that are difficult to deal with.”

Cowlick noted that even undergrounding efforts did not prove effective in the power of the storm. A landslide in Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative’s territory “took out every bit of their underground, so nothing was immune to the power of Helene,” he said.

Chastain agreed. “It’s not a question of hardening,” he said. “It’s just when you have 120 130 mile-an-hour winds that come in, we’ve got concrete poles—not just wooden poles—that are broken. So it’s Mother Nature. She can do a lot of damage in a short period of time when she’s that angry.”

Going forward, the co-ops recognize that they must continue to innovate and adapt their approaches, not just to withstand the initial impact but to streamline the restoration and recovery process in the aftermath of such catastrophic events. “It’s important for us to continuously try to get better on not what we can’t necessarily control, the weather or storms, but our after actions based on how do we restore as quickly and safely and efficiently as we possibly can,” said Golden. “That’s where we’ll spend a lot of time in the coming weeks.”

—Sonal Patel is a POWER senior editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine).

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grid resilience electric cooperatives storms Hurricane Helene power infrastructure resilience mutual aid Emergency Response storm recovery power outages utility sector extreme weather co-ops transmission and distribution NRECA