Editor’s note: As Hurricane Helene turned north on Sept. 27, 2024, it wreaked havoc on areas not normally prone to hurricanes. This is Part Two of our overview of Helene’s impact on electric cooperatives and their communities. Read Part One here.
Amid forecasts of inclement weather as Hurricane Helene approached, Chad Armstrong, vice president of human resources at Laurens Electric Cooperative, decided to get ahead of the game by stopping at Bojangles at 5 a.m. and grabbing 40 or so biscuits for the office.
“I figured we’d have a couple thousand members out. We would get 1,500 of them back on by 10 o’clock and we’d fight the rest of the day for the other 500,” Armstrong said in an interview at his office in Laurens, South Carolina, during the summer. “Bojangles is about 20 miles from here. From there to here, it was like no storm I’d ever been in. I’m driving right through the middle of the time the hurricane hit us. And, at that point, it seemed like the world was coming down.”
Within days, Armstrong would go from toting a few bags of biscuits to coordinating meals for 600 lineworkers at an abandoned grocery store lot and two other makeshift staging encampments.
“We’re really good at one and two-day outages,” he said. “But two-week outages get a little tougher.”
A turn for the worse
Storm planning is vital, but it’s difficult to prepare for something you never envisioned. After passing through Florida and Georgia, Helene veered unexpectedly to the northwest as it made its way into South Carolina, where it put some 425,000 members offline and snapped more than 5,000 co-op power poles.
“We’re used to the coastal co-ops dealing with hurricanes,” said Van O’Cain, director of member and public relations at the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. “This one just came basically up the Savannah River and hit co-ops that don’t normally experience anything like that.”
In Laurens, gusts reached 77 mph, the strongest in the state. “Before long, we went from 1,000 people to having 64,000 people out,” CEO Matt Stanley recalled. “We’d never seen anything like that and never thought we’d ever see anything like that, and it was scary.”
Even worse, for the first day, the co-op had no idea what it was up against. “Cellphones didn’t work. Our radio network wasn’t working very well. It was essentially a communications blackout,” said Nathan Brown, vice president of engineering and operations at Laurens Electric. “We didn’t fully realize what we had.”
At Aiken Electric Cooperative in South Carolina, 27 of 29 substations were out, an incredible 1,623 poles were on the ground, and 49,000 members had no electricity. “Trees, wires, poles, everything. It was horrible,” said Operations Manager Brad Ivey, who said workers labored for three days just to locate open, or disconnected, points on some circuits.
What’s more, it was a challenge to line up crews since many were already committed to states to the south. That meant a lot of long-distance travel. Kansas co-ops directed 85 lineworkers to Aiken, which totaled a staggering $55 million in overall costs, while Laurens hosted mutual aid from Iowa and Minnesota. In all, more than 3,400 lineworkers from mutual aid and South Carolina co-ops worked to restore power, O’Cain noted.
Still, the recruitment and travel time were worth it, Brown said. “I’m not talking about just building standards and specifications. I’m talking about attitude and approach, working together, getting it done. I think the value of that network and co-ops helping co-ops … nobody will ever have to explain that to me again.”
The influx of manpower had the co-ops bursting at the seams. Laurens created three staging areas from scratch, relying on longstanding connections for lodging, food and laundry. Armstrong knew a caterer with a freezer full of cooked, frozen brisket and ribs that would otherwise go to waste.
I think the value of that network and co-ops helping co-ops … nobody will ever have to explain that to me again.
Nathan Brown, Laurens Electric Cooperative
“It helped him, it helped us and the lineworkers ate well,” he said. “So it’s relationships that we had built before the storm that got us through the storm.”
With the community room at Aiken resembling an overflowing dormitory, engineer Emily Ayre pleaded her case at a hotel in nearby North Augusta.
“They had a ‘closed’ sign on their door. I literally looked in the window until they came to the door and said, ‘Please, I need some rooms’—basically just begging. They had partial power and they were able to get us some rooms, but I think that is the point where we needed to pull the trigger on the tent city.”
With a quickly constructed gathering place, lineworkers could count on cots for rest, three meals a day and fully fueled trucks as they headed out in the morning; Ayre estimated a peak tally of 900 contractors and co-op crews.
“It was a lifesaver. We would not have been able to get our power back on in 15 days,” said Aiken Electric’s Laurie Glenn, vice president of human resources.
Not all heroes overnighted on cots. Renee Smith, wife of Aiken Electric lineworker Travis Smith, was in her sixth day of delivering bagged lunches to crews when the co-op’s communicators caught up with her and her two young children outside their SUV.
“It’s hard to see your whole community destroyed and all we can do is help each other,” Smith said in an emotional video posted on Facebook. “All we can do is just lean on each other, lean on everyone and just continue to pray.” In another case, a tree crashed on the house and car of an Aiken employee with two young children. The spouse, without power and alone with the children, had to manage.
As Glenn concluded, “Our employees are dedicated, but so are their spouses. The satisfaction and passion that comes from restoring electricity to our membership is equally shared by the employee’s family.”
To Stanley, amid the trauma, Helene showed that the co-op network is truly its brother’s keeper.
“There’s nothing better than what you saw right here,” he concluded. “While we deal with our thunderstorms here and there, we never had to deal with a hurricane or anything of that type of devastation. We’ll certainly repay the favor somewhere along the way, I know.”
The retaking of Poplar
It was as much a military mission as a matter of power restoration. In mid-October, at the prodding of a serviceman, French Broad EMC CEO Jeff Loven decided to take a ride to the still-dark community of Poplar, nestled in the mountains near the North Carolina-Tennessee border. Back roads were impassable and dump trucks blocked his way; what should have taken 20 minutes stretched to an hour. When Loven stopped, he looked out and saw 26 spans of three-phase line on the ground under a heavy quilt of trees.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to fix this.’ It was so inaccessible. You couldn’t even see the poles. I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, it looked like a tornado. And this is three weeks in,” he said.
The answer? Divide and conquer, just like a military strategy. Loven assembled five crews, mainly from his Marshall, North Carolina-based co-op, along with 60 right-of-way workers. For five days, section by section, they cleared the area and ultimately restored power to 350 members.
“They were so excited. They thought it would be into next year before they got power,” Loven said. “That was the turning point right there, when we got that back on.”
National news audiences saw horrific flooding and despair in Asheville, North Carolina, when Helene zagged into the southern Appalachian region. Fan out into the less populated areas served by French Broad EMC, Forest City-based Rutherford EMC, Haywood EMC in Waynesville and Blue Ridge Energy in Lenoir, and the situation was as grim, if not more so.
“We had employees finding where roads were washed out, and people had been cut off from the world,” said Dirk Burleson, who has since retired as general manager at Rutherford. “Our employees were giving them a bottle of water and that’s the first water they had since it started.”
Gusts of 80-90 mph mixed with more than 20 inches of rainfall to wash homes, bridges, poles and lines down mountainsides and into raging waters. North Carolina recorded 78 flooding-related deaths. Helene toppled 100,000 trees in Mitchell County, served by French Broad EMC. Between them, Blue Ridge Energy and Rutherford EMC lost about 2,500 poles and 1,250 transformers, one of which was found perched under a tree nine months later. Cleanup at Rutherford did not end until this April.
“It was a 1,000-year flood in many areas of our service territory. From that standpoint, I don’t think you can prepare,” said Alan Merck, senior vice president and chief operating officer at Blue Ridge Energy. “Even underground facilities were washed away. The roads were gone. We had to get new easements to put poles on the other side of the road because the original side no longer existed.”
The rugged mountain terrain in western North Carolina compounded the logistical problems encountered by co-ops to the south. When Helene knocked out a Haywood EMC communications tower in the Great Balsam Mountains, the co-op’s two districts, a solid hour apart, lost touch with each other. “It was two or three days before we had even heard that they were all right,” said Mitch Bearden, chief communications officer.
It was a 1,000-year flood in many areas of our service territory. From that standpoint, I don’t think you can prepare.
Alan Merck, Blue Ridge Energy
With chasm-riddled roadways and little open space, there were few places to accommodate the 2,000 contractors and mutual aid crews that helped the four co-ops restore power and even fewer places to feed them. India Francis, Rutherford’s purchasing agent, was eight months pregnant and tracking down supplies in person.
“Our phones weren’t working and I couldn’t get a hold of anybody. I went to Ingles [Market], knocked on the door and said, ‘Hey, I know I can’t pay for this now, but is there any way I can get a pallet of water?’ And they let me in. So that’s kind of how we had to work it. I had to just drive around and do what I could. I was relying on one restaurant to feed hundreds of people.”
Add to Francis’ quest the need to pay cash-strapped vendors who desperately needed revenue at a time when banks were closed and ATMs were offline. “We were bumping up against our credit card limit and had to get our limit extended,” Burleson said. “We got the cash on hand to get us through a few days, but we didn’t have enough cash to carry us the 18 days it took us to restore the power. They were requiring cash to get a hotel room. It was a very tricky situation.”
Jeff Brittain, who succeeded Burleson as general manager at Rutherford, estimated the storm cost $20.5 million, about half of that in mutual aid expenses. French Broad suffered about $20 million in damage to a hydro plant along with another $40 million in spending.
“Our system was deeply hurt during the storm,” Merck said. “Ordinary weather events are causing a lot more outages than we’re accustomed to. So it’s putting a lot of strain, particularly on our frontline and our linemen working right now. They’ve got a lot on their plates. We’re determined to get our system back to the resiliency that it once was. But it’s going to take some time for us to get back there.”
Coming next week
In the next installment of our series, read about an electric cooperative in Tennessee that faces a changed world after Helene destroyed the vital manufacturing plant it served.
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 Rutherford EMC