Nearly 50,000 utility workers from 36 states battled flooded and mud-and-tree-blocked roads Monday to restore power after Hurricane Helene devastated river towns in southern Appalachia.
Mountain stretches near Asheville, North Carolina, and southwest of Greenville, South Carolina, suffered the greatest destruction from Helene, with rainfall destroying roads and triggering landslides over hundreds of miles.
Duke Energy, headquartered in Charlotte and the dominant utility in the region, had restored electricity to nearly three-quarters of a million customers in the Carolinas by Monday night. The job isn’t nearly complete, though. Duke will have to restore or replace submerged substations and thousands of downed utility poles and toppled transmission towers.
Officials at the utility predicted most outages would be resolved by Friday. Still, there were no estimates for when power would be restored to the hardest-hit communities.
“That may extend well beyond Friday,” said Duke spokesperson Jeff Brooks.
The storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane, then barreled north into the Appalachian Mountains and the Tennessee Valley. On Monday evening, the Associated Press reported that the death toll across the region stood at 121.
At its peak, Helene cut off 6 million customers. As of early last evening, power had been restored to about 4 million customers.
For the Carolinas, Helene is the return of nightmares from the devastation of Hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018. Some people displaced during those storms remain in temporary housing, according to community activists.
The increasing frequency and severity of climate-related natural disasters across the U.S. is raising the economic costs and political consequences for utilities whose networks do not hold up to the weather assaults. The shocks in hardest-hit states — headed by Texas, California and Hawaii — have placed more onus on state regulators to pay attention to what’s not getting done.
Over the past decade, high-level federal government and utility leadership have built greater capacity and coordination to respond rapidly to the gravest infrastructure threats during disasters.
Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, said the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, the primary emergency coordination panel of power industry and federal officials, began conference calls last Wednesday in preparation for the hurricane. The severity of recent storms, Aaronson said, has prompted an expansion of response strategies, including increased stockpiling of transformers, poles, wires and other grid equipment, with help from the Department of Energy.
But utilities can’t restore power to homes that have been swept away or left uninhabitable, until they are replaced or rebuilt, he said. “In some cases, that’s going to be a very long time,” Aaronson said.
Rebuild, not repair
Jason Hollifield, Duke Energy’s storm director for the Carolinas, said stretches of damage simply can’t be assessed yet because of mudslides, flooding and blocked roads.
“Based on what we can see on the ground, from helicopter and by drone,” he said, “there are lots of areas across the South Carolina upstate and North Carolina mountains where we’re going to have to completely rebuild parts of our system, not just repair it.”
Aaronson said the challenges of power restoration in the hardest-hit Appalachian mountain regions brought back memories of the tortuous recovery battles in Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm in 2017. In that case, much of the infrastructure also had to be rebuilt, not simply repaired.
Environmental and development challenges are nothing new in the Carolinas and Tennessee, either, where New Deal legislation created the Tennessee Valley Authority almost a century ago to control flooding that had become so frequent and destructive that farmers couldn’t make a living. Today, as the effects of climate change move more inland, floods threaten to inundate metropolitan areas and the electricity infrastructure sustaining a growing population in the South, including in places such as Asheville, North Carolina, or Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Utilities across the region face not only the immediate costs of recovery but the rising costs of preparing for the next major weather attack on the grid.
Stan Cross, a policy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, reported from his home in western North Carolina: “There is no power, water, or cell service, and it will likely remain that way for some time. Critical infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed,” he said.
“To put it in perspective,” he added, “the rivers rose over a third more than ever in recorded history, inundating and washing away whole sections of towns in and outside of flood zones. Recovery will be measured in years.”
The Southern Alliance and other clean energy advocates drew a direct link between the increasing toll of extreme weather on utilities and their customers and the need to address planet-warming emissions. The Republican and Democratic presidential tickets couldn’t be farther apart on the issue. Broadly, Vice President Kamala Harris supports action to shift to cleaner-burning fuels that would cut greenhouse gas emissions causing temperatures to rise and triggering more extreme weather. Former President Donald Trump disputes that the federal government has a role in responding to climate change.
But the upfront costs of reducing future climate-linked damage from carbon emissions is battling pressures to control current utility budgets and increasing electricity prices.
Critics of Duke Energy’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions renewed pressure on the utility to steer more of its investment plan to consumer and community owned power, particularly rooftop solar units and battery story, which they said could have been speeding recovery now.
“They are in a bad place, said Bobby Jones of Goldsboro, North Carolina, and founder of Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition, which has battled Duke and state officials over cleanup of the immense deposits of coal mining wastes form Duke’s operations.
“There will be lots of bad days ahead before they get back,” Jones added, citing the long and still-uncompleted recovery campaigns in the eastern Carolinas after the previous hurricanes. “People who have been historically abused in these communities — Black, brown and poor white — now have to endure this.”
“This is a haunting situation,” said Jim Warren, executive director of NC Warn, an advocacy group and constant Duke Energy critic.
Recalling the challenges that confronted utility and state leaders after Matthew and Florence, he said, “If they couldn’t make it work on flat lands close to the coast,” he said of state-led recovery efforts, “how are they going to do it in the mountains?”
