We will take a short hiatus from our current series on the evolution of safety in order to discuss what has kept everyone busy for the last month – the Emergency Work Plan. We will resume the other series in the first quarter 2025.
A low-pressure system began brewing on September 22, 2024, in the western Caribbean Sea. By September 24, the low-pressure system had consolidated enough to become a tropical storm, receiving the name Helene from the National Hurricane Center.
Within one day, Helene would grow to hurricane strength due to its rapid intensification. During the late hours of September 26, Helene would make landfall as a Category 4 Hurricane in the Big Bend region of Florida with sustained winds of 140 mph, resulting in the strongest hurricane to ever strike that region. Taking an eastward turn from its expected path, the hurricane would tear up Florida, rip through the heart of Georgia, then through Tennessee, while clipping the western sections of the Carolinas and Virginia and even causing numerous power outages in Kentucky and ˿϶Ƶ in its 500-mile path of destruction before finally dissipating as a tropical depression near the Kentucky-Tennessee border.
Hurricane Helene left more than 230 dead, establishing itself as the deadliest hurricane in nearly two decades. And beyond the deaths, there are still 20 families looking for closure, probably with slight hopes of finding those who are still missing.
What made Helene so much worse? Most hurricanes include widespread destruction and power outages from high winds resulting in thousands of trees down on power lines, but the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene was unprecedented. Helene did damage in several states, but the destruction in North Carolina is unfathomable. The lives of families will be impacted in the rural Appalachian region for many, many years. Infrastructure is gone. Roads. Homes. Vehicles. Even railroad tracks that will “never be rebuilt”. Unless you see it with your own eyes, you will never understand how the rural North Carolina landscape could ever return to what it once was.
I was in areas where the water had risen 27 feet. To drive on a road that is open with only one lane and a steep drop-off where the other lane was washed away has now become the norm. Many of the roads will be closed for months and years. There is still no timeline to rebuild and re-open I-40 that connects Tennessee and North Carolina.
Thousands of homes were wiped out by the flooding, many of which had no flood insurance. Even today, four weeks later, many families who were already financially challenged are still trying to figure out how they could ever move forward in life.
But as we know, millions of people also lost their power. And they lost it at such a clip that it was literally an “all hands on deck” situation for the cooperatives impacted by the storm. If you click on that article, you will see Broad River EC’s CEO fixing hot dogs and packing lunches for the linemen, some of which were our men.
But it was also an “all hands-on deck” situation for cooperatives across the country who would be asked to assist. ˿϶Ƶ’s distribution cooperatives responded when North and South Carolina called, requesting our help. As we were putting crews together, things became complicated in the early afternoon when Helene began hitting the Buckeye REC, Adams REC, and South Central Power systems very hard. In all, more than half of our cooperatives were impacted by the storm, with more than one hundred broken poles.
The list of names that we had compiled to send south was reduced to less than 50% within a 4-6-hour span as Helene raced north at seemingly warp speed. It was hard to believe that the same system that had hit Florida just hours earlier was now wreaking havoc throughout ˿϶Ƶ, especially the southern portion.
But we did indeed send crews to the Carolinas the next morning while some of the cooperatives were still restoring their own systems. Before it was all over, OH/WV would assist Buckeye and Adams in state, and Laurens EC and Broad River EC in South Carolina. In North Carolina, ˿϶Ƶ first assisted Energy United, then Rutherford EMC, Blue Ridge Energy, and French Broad EMC. This article will not discuss Hurricane Milton which followed just two weeks later, but ˿϶Ƶ did send one crew down to assist Withlacoochee River EC in Florida as well.
French Broad is still telling their members that their estimated full restoral time is 4-6 months. If you’ve been there, it’s easy to understand because of the many challenges converge in one area. Two weeks after the storm hit, I was still running over 3-phase feeder conductors as I navigated a state route, attempting to visit some of our assisting line crews.
After visiting crews at French Broad, it was my aim to next visit the crews at Blue Ridge Energy. From my location, the crew I was seeking out to visit was literally just 19 miles away as the crow flies. After driving for more than 3 hours, encountering closed road after closed road, I finally decided I was unable to get to the crew. So, I headed north, just to encounter more state routes that had been washed away by the flooding, even up in Tennessee.
When it was all said and done, 139 linemen from 20 co-ops would help restore someone’s distribution system other than their own over a 4-week period, representing 37% of OH/WV’s total workforce. As this is being written, the last two crews assisting French Broad in NC were on their way home. We thank God for his protection over our workers over the last four weeks while working in difficult conditions.
Thank you to ˿϶Ƶ’s distribution cooperatives for being an example of cooperation among cooperatives and displaying how the cooperative family extends beyond ˿϶Ƶ’s borders. And thank you also for your support that allows the Safety Training & Loss Prevention department of ˿϶Ƶ’s Electric Cooperatives to help prepare your employees for such situations through COLT, one of the leading lineworker training programs in the nation.