Hurricane Helene that has made landfall in the United States has caused power lines to be destroyed in some rural areas of the country, utility officials said.
Members of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said Hurricane Helene, which barreled north after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, tore up thousands of miles of transmission lines and poles in hard-to-reach parts of the country.
Dennis Chastain, CEO of Georgia Electric Membership Corp. said he has never experienced anything like this in his 38 years in the business.
Local electric cooperatives, owned by their customers, cover more than half of the country’s landscape.
Georgia’s transmission provider for Electric cooperatives in the state had 166 distribution stations that went out during the height of the storm. According to Michael Couick, head of the Cooperative Association in South Carolina, Hurricane Helene knocked down at least 2,000 utility poles.
Couick said in the area around the Blue Ridge Mountains, energy workers are trying to rebuild 7,300 miles (11,748 kkm) of transmission lines, the length of which nearly covers the diameter of the earth.
This rebuilding is expected to require climbing mountainsides and drilling into solid rock, but only after accessing roads that may have been washed away by flooding.
Couick added that when he thinks of rebuilding, he thinks of some of the most remote areas of the country.
The Southeast’s largest investor-owned utilities, including Duke Energy and Southern Co, which shut down coal and nuclear generating units due to the storm, also have a daunting rebuilding task ahead of them.
Duke, the largest utility covering North Carolina and South Carolina, still had nearly 650,000 customers without power on Tuesday after restoring power to 1.6 million homes and businesses in the state.
Investor-owned utilities have the largest share of customers in the country, with cooperatives and municipal utilities taking the rest.
Scott Corwin, CEO of the American Public Association said while it will be a long road to recovery, requiring significant rebuilding in many places, we will persevere until the job is done.
More than 1.4 million electricity customers in 10 states are still without power five days after Helene made landfall in Florida.
