Hurricane Helene — Day Two

The Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tives of SC

Hur­ri­cane Helene was a cat­a­stroph­ic storm with his­toric, Hugo-lev­el impacts in South Car­oli­na.

South Car­oli­na elec­tric coop­er­a­tive crews are work­ing around the clock this week­end to restore pow­er, but giv­en the sever­i­ty of the destruc­tion in Helene’s wake, this process is going to take sev­er­al more days for large swaths of the state.

• For much of the west­ern half of South Car­oli­na, it will take at least a week before pow­er is com­plete­ly restored.

We’ve made progress.

• We’re down to about 282,000 out­ages for co-op mem­bers statewide, down from a peak of 425,000 Fri­day morn­ing. (As of 1 p.m. 9/28/24)
  • Helene knocked out pow­er for about half the co-op sys­tem Fri­day morn­ing.
• A lit­tle less than half of our sub­sta­tions across the state remain offline – about 80 in total – but we have made progress in bring­ing that num­ber down. (as of 12:30 p.m. 9/28/24)
• Every one of our co-ops has line crews out in the field.
• Some of our co-ops on the east­ern half side of the state, includ­ing Hor­ry Elec­tric and Berke­ley Elec­tric, are fin­ish­ing up their restora­tion work and send­ing crews to help fel­low co-ops in the west­ern half of the state.
• We are get­ting help from oth­er states that were less affect­ed by Helene.
  • About 50 line work­ers from Alaba­ma arrived on Fri­day.
  • More help is on the way: 50 work­ers from Ohio and about 20 from Vir­ginia are com­ing this week­end.

For co-ops in the Upstate and along the west­ern bor­der of South Car­oli­na, this is not a sim­ple restora­tion job. This is a rebuild of our elec­tric sys­tem.

• Much of our state hasn’t seen this lev­el of dam­age since Hur­ri­cane Hugo in 1989.
• Some parts of the state are see­ing even more dam­age than Hugo left.
• It may be hard to fath­om since Sat­ur­day has been so warm and clear, but there are still so many trees down and roads blocked in parts of the state, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Upstate, we still haven’t been able to com­plete­ly assess the dam­age yet.
• But we know dozens of major trans­mis­sion lines — which act like the inter­states of our pow­er grid — were knocked out of com­mis­sion.
• Dozens more sub­sta­tions and deliv­ery points — which are like inter­state exits — were knocked offline and still remain offline as well.
• At least 1,400 coop­er­a­tive pow­er poles were snapped by this storm and need to be replaced. And we are still count­ing.
  • It takes about 3–4 hours, on aver­age, for a four-man to replace a bro­ken pole. Replac­ing three poles over a 12-hour shift is a full day’s work for a sin­gle crew. Replac­ing four is an unusu­al and tremen­dous accom­plish­ment.
• We hear from our mate­ri­als sup­pli­er, CEEUS, that our co-ops’ need for mate­ri­als and sup­plies is about 10 times more than we see in typ­i­cal storms.
  • This storm will require about 4–6 months of our usu­al sup­ply of over­head line mate­ri­als – about the same vol­ume of mate­r­i­al as we need­ed to respond to Hur­ri­cane Hugo in 1989.
  • Our sup­pli­er is send­ing out about 15 trac­tor trail­er loads of mate­r­i­al dai­ly.
  • That includes wood crossarms (those T’s you see at the top of pow­er poles), crossarm braces, over­head trans­form­ers, insu­la­tors, cutouts, arrestors, fus­es, hot line clamps and more.

An extend­ed pow­er out­age is a sig­nif­i­cant incon­ve­nience, and we care deeply about how this affects our con­sumers.

• The peo­ple work­ing on fix­ing this dam­age live in these com­mu­ni­ties. Many of them are work­ing all day and then com­ing home to hous­es that are dam­aged or with­out pow­er. They get it.
• A line­man at Black Riv­er Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive had his house burn to the ground Fri­day night. He lost every­thing, and he is com­ing back to work on Sun­day. He gets it.
• We have nev­er been more depen­dent on elec­tric­i­ty than we are today.
  • We get it, and we want to get the pow­er on as soon as pos­si­ble.

Our crews are work­ing hard to address this dam­age, but we’re fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges out in the field.

• Due to the sever­i­ty of the dam­age, some of our crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture will need to be rebuilt and replaced rather than fixed. That work is more time con­sum­ing.
• Some of our co-ops have had their com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems knocked offline, which has made the chal­lenge of coor­di­nat­ing a storm response more dif­fi­cult.
• Get­ting out-of-state crews has been a chal­lenge.
  • Before the storm hit, oth­er states were reluc­tant to com­mit to send­ing us crews because they didn’t know how they would be impact­ed.
  • After the storm hit, there are a lot of states hurt­ing and in need of crews.
• Just as we’re scram­bling to secure crews from out of state to come help, we’re scram­bling to secure fuel for our co-op trucks and hous­ing for line crews that are com­ing into the state to help.

We under­stand the need to work fast, but it’s also crit­i­cal that safe­ty be our top con­cern.

• Even after the storm has passed, there are dan­gers asso­ci­at­ed with restor­ing elec­tric ser­vice after a destruc­tive storm. Mit­i­gat­ing those dan­gers takes time.
• We’ve had trees fall on two trucks that were out work­ing for co-ops.
  • One tree fell across a Broad Riv­er Elec­tric truck while the line work­er was in it. He was tak­en to the hos­pi­tal, and he’s OK, but it real­ly shook him up.

We need your help. Please be patient as we under­take this work. Please bear with us as we do the work of restor­ing pow­er to South Car­oli­na.