Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories examining the impact of Hurricane Helene on electric cooperatives as we approach the one-year mark of the historic storm.
Mike High remembers the vacant expressions on the faces of staffers who watched Hurricane Helene light up Blue Ridge Energy’s outage maps like Christmas trees in its Lenoir, North Carolina, office.
“Dead silence and staring at the computers blankly,” recalled High, director of engineering services and a veteran of Florida hurricanes. “It was just being taken aback by how bad the situation was and how much it was escalating.”
Brian Street remembers sloshing over wet ground as the crew leader dealt with an early morning outage in the foothills of Rutherford EMC’s North Carolina territory. Then the water rose to his ankles. Then it was up to his boots. Soon, he was sheltering in place.
“There was just no way to keep up with it,” he said.
This summer, a state legislator in South Carolina remarked to Matt Stanley, CEO of Laurens Electric Cooperative, “Well, I guess Helene’s behind you now, isn’t it?” Stanley gave a polite smile, thinking about the lasting damage, the financial consequences, the paperwork and the weakened trees that Helene left for future storms to topple.
“It’s going to be the storm that sticks around with us for a long, long time,” he responded.
It has been nearly a year since Hurricane Helene unleashed destruction unlike any in the 90-year history of the electric cooperative network. Initial estimates placed co-op outages at 1.25 million; a review of filings with state and federal agencies put the number at closer to 1.44 million, more than twice as many as Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Helene claimed 250 lives and burdened co-ops from Florida to Tennessee with hundreds of millions of dollars in repair costs.
Lineworkers from a record 28 states, including the seven most-affected ones, responded to calls, with some spending weeks in outposts previously known to them only on a map. A sampling: 33 Missouri co-ops dispatched 353 lineworkers to work on Helene. Twenty-five percent of the entire co-op line crew in Ohio relocated to North and South Carolina.
Yet the power is back and communities large and small have regained their footing, if not quite the one they were used to, thanks to lineworkers who crawled up mountain slopes to set poles, resilient staffers who rose before dawn to crack eggs and feed strangers, and spouses who filled in as launderers and caretakers even as they stared at damage in their homes and in their lives.
“I think we depend on each other, which we did before, too,” said Laurie Glenn, vice president of human resources at Aiken Electric Cooperative in Aiken, South Carolina, who essentially lived in her office for 11 days, showering quickly at 3 a.m. to make sure others would get a chance at hot water. “But I think when you go through something like this, it gives you the opportunity to know your fellow coworkers even better than you did before. It’s how you become a family.”
First rumblings
Call it hurricane fatigue. The staff and consumer-members of Tri-County Electric Cooperative had an understandable sense of foreboding as Helene loomed off the Big Bend coast of western Florida with peak winds that the National Hurricane Center estimated at 138 mph. In August 2023, Hurricane Idalia took out 20,000 meters and 600 poles; less than two months before Helene, Hurricane Debby damaged 28 miles of line and darkened 19,240 meters.
Three hurricanes in 13 months. All within about 20 miles of each other.
“There was absolutely a sense of ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’” said Kaitlynn Culpepper, community relations director at the Madison-based co-op. “Up until that last night, there was a hope that it would turn. There was a hope that it would decrease in strength and something, a miracle, will happen. And when it didn’t, it was devastating.”
Helene roared ashore as a Category 4 hurricane just after 11 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2024, near Perry, Florida. No fiercer a storm has hit the Big Bend since accurate recordkeeping began around 1900. Within hours, Helene shut down nearly 265,000 co-op meters in the state, including all 20,114 served by Tri-County.
Culpepper said the co-op permanently lost 250 meter locations, the majority of which were homes. “It’s really hard to go down to those communities, knowing your favorite beach restaurant is in piles and your cousin’s boat is over in a field.”
There was a hope that it would decrease in strength and something, a miracle, will happen. And when it didn’t, it was devastating.
Kaitlynn Culpepper, Tri-County Electric Cooperative
On the subject of nautical equipment, David Lambert, general manager of Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative, came across an 80-foot sailboat ensnared in the co-op’s power lines in Hudson, about a half-mile from shore.
“It was like midnight, two o’clock in the morning, and we were going to help our night crews,” Lambert said. “Here’s this huge sailboat with its mast within a foot of our power line. Probably the power line is what stopped it from going further inland. We unhooked the mast of the sailboat and got it out of the way so we could get it energized. And I said, ‘How in the world did this thing come a half-a-mile inland?’”
The Dade City-based co-op maintains sentries along the coast so it knows exactly when to disconnect power in the face of onrushing water—waves of 18 feet in some instances with Helene. Suddenly, the co-op is more than lineworkers repairing poles or communicators snapping pictures.
“You become a weatherman. You become everything,” Lambert said. “Because we’re a coastal co-op, we have a lot of water equipment. So the fire chief or the county administrator is on the phone saying, ‘We need every boat, every piece of equipment you have to come help us rescue people.’ We pulled a lot of members out of areas that they couldn’t get to otherwise.”
The storm was gone within a few hours. Yet it’s fair to say restoration was years in the making. Ten days before Helene hit, Withlacoochee River crews were coming off duty in Louisiana with Hurricane Francine. Once back home, the co-op’s lineworkers had power up and running within 48 hours to 95% of the 110,000 members affected by the storm.
“We have had years of practice going to storms, helping people, and we’ve had years of practice restoring our own service territory.” Lambert said. “Experience is a great teacher. By necessity, you become very professional at it.”
Similarly, long before Idalia and Debby, Tri-County underwent a roundtable exercise of a hurricane similar to Helene. With the help of a consultant, the 68-employee co-op filled voids in its disaster response plan, such as the location of a common base camp for logistics, accommodation and meals, something it had not attempted before Idalia.
That would be essential during Helene as more than 1,900 mutual aid workers converged on TCEC territory to restore essentially all power within nine days despite the loss of 1,065 poles and 103 miles of fiber and electrical lines.
“Getting 2,000 people into a base camp driveway at 11 o’clock at night requires some help. So we have a great relationship with the sheriff’s department to help with that,” Culpepper said. “We weren’t scrambling to figure those things out in the aftermath and slow down progress.”
Out of the darkness of multiple storms, then, comes light.
“The positive side of going through this so often is that our membership, our employees and our contacts know what to expect. They’re better prepared. They’re more informed, they’re more engaged. They’ve already downloaded the app, they’re following us on Facebook,” she said.
“They know the routine and that is extremely beneficial to us, that we have created that connection with all of our members, even if it has been through tragedy time and time again. We were ready. We knew what to do.”
Proper terminology
Lewis Sheffield, general manager of Little Ocmulgee Electric Cooperative in Georgia, respects the damage caused by Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Michael in 2018.
But as far as devastation goes, a post-Helene name change is in order at Little Ocmulgee. “Technically, we now call it Tropical Storm Irma and Tropical Storm Michael. We used to call them hurricanes, but now we’ve seen what a real hurricane looks like. We’re not changing the history books, but when we reference them verbally, we call those tropical storms now.”
Located in Alamo, about three hours southeast of Atlanta, Little Ocmulgee is the classic small-town co-op that suddenly faced a big-time problem. With a staff of 38, it can usually pull together at best 25 workers for assessments and power restoration.
But when Helene passed through early on Sept. 27, it knocked out power to all 12,500 members, including hard-to-reach areas in sparsely populated Wheeler County, where an EF-1 tornado killed two people.
A mere ride to the office challenged even a skilled off-road racer. “That morning, it took me about four or five hours to get 30 miles to where I was supposed to report to because all the roads were blocked with trees,” Sheffield said. “What was unreal to me was how large the trees were that fell in every different direction, pulled down by the root ball.”
At Canoochee EMC in Reidsville, about an hour east of Alamo, Joseph Sikes’ 45-minute commute was no better. The co-op’s communications specialist remembered Hurricane Matthew in 2016 resulted in road closures on his trip to work. He picked what he thought was a safe alternative only to encounter a fire official blocking a four-way stop.
“I had my logo shirt on and I said to him, ‘I need to get to Canoochee.’ And he goes, ‘Good luck, brother. I’ve already turned back five of your guys.’”
Little Ocmulgee and Canoochee were among Georgia EMCs that totaled about 435,000 outages. They quickly enlisted contractors and mutual aid crews to clear roads. Meanwhile, Georgia Transmission, the cooperative that builds and maintains most of the state’s EMC transmission infrastructure, tackled what would be $38 million in damage. Nearly 200 of its substations were offline with 152 transmission lines down at peak, affecting some 435,000 EMC members.
“This was catastrophic,” said Craig Heighton, director of external affairs at Georgia Transmission. “We’ve had this kind of damage before—lines out, trees on lines that need to be cleared. But when I say catastrophic, it was a Herculean effort because we’ve never seen in our history this sheer amount of storm damage all at once.”
We’ve never seen in our history this sheer amount of storm damage all at once.
Craig Heighton, Georgia Transmission
What helped cut transmission repair time to little more than a week was the state’s jointly operated transmission system among GTC, Georgia Power, MEAG Power and Dalton Utilities. They work on each other’s lines and reduce redundancies, noted Heighton, who added that crews from PowerSouth Energy Cooperative in Andalusia, Alabama, were vital to rebuilding a tattered system.
“Even though we were walloped, we were able to get all transmission restored in a matter of about a week. I know that seems like a long time and our goal is to get it up just as quickly and safely as possible. But to have that much damage and to work it in about a week’s time was pretty good, we felt.”
On the distribution side, Little Ocmulgee, Canoochee and Altamaha EMC in Lyons, which lost 1,500 poles and power to all its 21,000 members, shared a tent city near Vidalia to centralize meals and accommodations for their visitors.
The base camp was not a total answer, though, as a 10-member team from Intercounty Electric Cooperative Association in Licking, Missouri, was plodding 60 to 90 minutes to get to work sites. Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Cadwell changed that, opening its community room to Intercounty workers with sleeping bags, showers, meals and laundry services.
“They did our laundry while we were working,” said construction foreman Aaron Scantlin. “It saved a lot of time, for sure. The people down there were really nice to us. They were just thankful we were down there.”
Canoochee, which lost 600 poles, is applying a lesson from the experience, converting an area that Helene stripped of trees into a future staging ground. “I feel like we’re definitely battle-hardened from earlier storms, but we handled it well,” Sikes said.
For Little Ocmulgee, the final count was astounding—625 outside workers plus 25 from the co-op took 18 days to bring back power to meters in service. Sheffield put the cost of Helene at $23.5 million.
Amid the horror, though, notes of hope stood out. When Little Ocmulgee learned of a nursing home desperately in need of air conditioning days into the storm, lineworkers loaded up in the dark of night, jumped a fence, waded through 18 inches of water and got the power back on. One member went so far as to suggest the lineworkers should be Time magazine’s Men of the Year, instead of politicians or celebrities.
“You don’t want to have it happen again,” Sheffield said. “I don’t want it to happen to anybody else either. I want to be careful. I don’t wish anybody else damage. But I hope we never see that again,” he said.
Coming next week: The storm heads north
“Co-ops don’t normally experience anything like that”: In Part 2 of this story, publishing next week, hear from co-ops in the Carolinas about the brutal impact of Helene far inland.
Contributing writer Steven Johnson is a former managing editor at NRECA, where he started in 2005, and former editor of Cooperative Living and vice president at the Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives.
Banner Image Courtesy WREC