MERCER COUNTY, W.Va. — It’s been just over a year since Hurricane Helene made landfall, and Appalachian Power is reflecting on the long road to recovery.
Helene ripped up multiple towns in North Carolina and Tennesse and killed at least 250 people. At the peak, 282,000 Appalachian Power customers were without electricity across its zone in West Virginia and parts of Virginia and Tennessee. That’s more than a quarter of the utility’s entire customer base.
In West Virginia, the most significant damage came to Mercer County, as dozens of trees came down and over half of the 30,000 statewide outages were reported in the county.
Appalachian Power sent out a release last week detailing the following services done by the utility in the aftermath of Helene:
- One million hours worked in the field
- 3,100 unique repair locations
- 1,485 poles replaced
- 1,140 cross arms replaced
- 471 transformers replaced
- 214 miles of transmission lines repaired
- 7,360 line, tree and support personnel
Appalachian Power Communications Director George Porter says this was nowhere near a standard storm for their crews.
“It wasn’t just a storm that came through and took power out and we were able to get out and restore it. There was just so much devastation,” Poter told MetroNews. “There were so many roads that were closed, so many landslides, so many trees down, so many buildings that toppled that we really couldn’t just start the restoration work. We had to help the community with the devastation and the cleanup before we could even get out there to it.”
“We quickly found out as Hurricane Helene came through, that we were in it for the long haul,” he continued.
According to Porter, this was an unprecedented restoration process for Appalachian Power.
“In a lot of areas, we actually had to pretty much re-build the grid. So much of our territory was destroyed, certain areas we couldn’t even get to,” he said. “You see the graphic with 1,400 poles (replaced). A good amount of those poles and to be flown in by helicopter because we couldn’t even get to the locations to build them in.”
He says the company has been working to get a lot of its structures replaced anyway, but this storm became the dictator quickly.
“A lot of our infrastructure was built in the 1920’s and 1930’s and 1940’s, and we’ve been constantly working through the process of getting new infrastructure put in place in a lot of these territories, but it takes time. That’s capital projects, it takes time to get to, unless a hurricane comes through. When a hurricane comes through, he or she will dictate that, ‘I’m taking every structure down now,” Porter said.