How Helene shaped SC utilities’ preparation, response to future storms

NEWBERRY, S.C. (WIS) — In his nearly five decades working in the power industry, Newberry Electric Cooperative President and CEO Keith Avery pays closer attention to the TV in his office, tracking a pair of storms brewing in the tropics, than ever before.

Hurricanes normally don’t have much of an impact on Newberry Electric’s service area, tucked into the Midlands and part of the Upstate, and hours away from the coast.

Then came Helene, one year ago.

“We kind of had to react instead of being proactive like we would normally do,” Avery said.

South Carolina utilities admit that while they prepare for storms, this one caught them off guard when it arrived in the state with such fury the morning of Sept. 27, 2024, after making landfall in Florida the day before.

“I don’t think we anticipated this much damage,” Fairfield Electric Cooperative CEO Bruce Bacon said.

Helene’s unexpected route into South Carolina, veering further east than predicted, turned off the power for more than a million homes and businesses, as the state dealt with more outages than any other from the storm.

Getting it back on was what Dominion Energy Vice President of Transmission and Delivery Brandon Ashley described as a “Herculean effort,” carried out by thousands of linemen collectively from across the state.

They replaced not just snapped and downed power lines but also thousands of poles and transformers, along with repairing heavier equipment that could take days to fix.

“This wasn’t really an effort to repair our system; it was an effort to rebuild it,” Ashley said.

Both Dominion and Fairfield Electric reported more than half their customers or members lost power at some point — nearly half a million customers alone in Dominion’s expansive territory.

For Newberry Electric, the lights were totally off.

“There for a while, we didn’t have a meter spinning. Everybody was out,” Avery said.

All three utilities said they had kept their crews in South Carolina before the storm, waiting for it to pass to determine if they were needed at home or if they could assist with restoration in other states.

But they needed extra hands, and linemen arrived from as far away as Iowa and Michigan.

“That was a big storm — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, all the way into North Carolina — so you can imagine the challenges we had, trying to bring help in,” Avery said.

Some utilities, for the first time, really harnessed the power of social media to keep their members and customers up to speed on restoration efforts, posting written updates, photos of linemen at work, and videos of executives explaining what crews had accomplished and what still remained.

It’s a step many say they will take for future storms, too, especially as people without power take to social media to express frustration and question where crews are if they haven’t seen them on their street.

“It was really important for us to show what they were dealing with, and the feedback on social media was great,” Bacon said. “We had so much support from the membership. They realized what we were doing, and they realized we were going to work until we got everybody’s power back on.”

Helene also taught them to prepare even more ahead of time for the what-ifs, according to Avery, like how they will feed and lodge their crews, who were working 16-hour days and without power themselves post-Helene.

Because of a limited supply of hotel rooms in the area, Newberry Electric booked rooms where it could find them, in short-term rentals and cabins on Lake Murray, and some workers slept on cots at the YMCA or at the nearest Red Cross shelter.

Since restaurants were also without power, the co-op connected with a former caterer in town, who prepared three meals a day for upwards of 140 people.

All those logistics, Avery said, were part of their after-action report and now considered in future storm preparations.

“There’s always something you learn,” he said. “Always something.”

Powers companies said Helene also reinforced what they were already doing effectively before her arrival.

“Each day, we train, we mobilize, we prepare to respond in times of emergency. Helene was no different,” Ashley said.

Utilities said they will continue preparing for the worst in future storms after being reminded, just a year ago, that it could be the reality.

“It just kind of awakens,” Bacon said. “A lot of the folks that work here were not around when Hugo hit, so now they have a frame of reference that, hey, this is what could possibly be the worst-case scenario.”

One action utility all said they are not going to take in the wake of Hurricane Helene is to bury all their power lines.

They said that type of project is way too expensive, adding that burying lines is not a silver bullet to prevent all outages and can even make restoration harder in disasters like severe flooding.

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