Restoring power to parts of rural US after storm will take weeks, utilities say

(Reuters) – Restoring power to parts of the rural United States could take several weeks after Hurricane Helene decimated stretches of the southeast electrical grid, electric utility officials said on Tuesday.

Helene, which barreled north after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, ripped away thousands of miles of transmission lines and power poles in hard-to-reach parts of the country, members of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said on a call.

“I’ve been in this business for 38 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dennis Chastain, who is chief executive officer of Georgia Electric Membership Corporation. “It is devastation that’s hard to describe.”

Local electric cooperatives, which are owned by their customers, cover more than half of the country’s landscape.

Georgia’s transmission provider for the state’s electric co-ops had 166 distribution stations out during the peak of the storm. In South Carolina, Helene wiped out at least 2,000 power poles, said Michael Couick, who heads that state’s association of co-ops.

In an area around the Blue Ridge Mountains, energy workers are attempting to rebuild 7,300 miles of transmission line, which is a length that could almost cover the diameter of earth, Couick said.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Leslie Adler and Aurora Ellis)