Once the huge job of restoring power from Hurricane Helene is done, some electric cooperatives in the Southeast face an even more daunting task: completely rebuilding their systems destroyed by the storm’s ferocious winds and flooding rains.
“This is not just a matter of power outages; it’s about lives turned upside down, homes lost and communities facing weeks—if not months—of recovery,” Thomas Golden, CEO of EnergyUnited in Statesville, North Carolina, said at a news conference hosted by NRECA last week.
“Some of our hardest-hit areas are not dealing with a simple fix. They’re facing a complete rebuild of their electrical infrastructure, their roads and even their daily lives.”
Co-ops have an especially tough task of rebuilding because they serve some of the most remote areas of the country, said Mike Couick, president and CEO of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina.
One of the state’s co-ops, Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative in Pickens, saw its underground power lines wash down the mountainside, along with trees and power poles, Couick said.
“They’re rebuilding a system of 7,300 miles of line,” he said. “That’s almost the diameter of the planet Earth. And it runs straight up mountainsides.”
Ron Barnes, president and CEO of Coast Electric Power Association in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, knows better than most what it means to rebuild a co-op system after a disaster. He was working at the co-op as vice president of marketing, member services and public relations when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Coast Electric lost 30,000 power poles and 10,000 transformers. It took a full year and $110 million for the co-op to rebuild its system, with major funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It’s not as dark as it seems at the moment,” he advises co-ops hit by Hurricane Helene. “You have all these pressures on you, and you say, ‘Oh my gosh, how are we ever going to do this?’ It seems like it will never end when you’re in the middle of it, but it does.”
The co-op restored power in just three weeks to members whose homes and businesses were still standing after Katrina.