MINNEAPOLIS— It’s been six days Hurricane Helene made landfall along the Gulf Coast and many communities in the South are struggling to recover.
According to PowerOutage.us, more than 1.1 million homes in the Carolinas and Georgia are still without power as of Wednesday evening.
“You know the event is bad when you come from Minnesota and drive a day and a half to go there and provide the relief,” said Joe Miller, communications director for the Minnesota Rural Electric Association.
The sheer amount of wind and rain has left millions of people in limbo, and the terrain is only making matters worse.
“It’s a very mountainous area in the Carolinas. To even get in there to make repairs, the trees are down and the lines are down. They can’t even get through, so there’s a lot of work to be done to to restore some of the buildings.” those areas,” Miller said.
That’s why more than seventy line workers from eighteen different Minnesota electric cooperatives join electrical crews from at least fifteen states to get the job done.
“Anytime you’re dealing with power lines that you’re not familiar with, one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, when it’s on the ground, everything is a mess and disarray. It’s a very challenging process when you have the wire has to pick up all those pieces and try to put them back together,” says Dan Meier, Operations Manager for Steele-Waseca Cooperative Electric.
Steele-Waseca in Owatonna is sending four line workers. They are among the last Minnesotans heading to South Carolina. Meier said this is the first time his team has been deployed so far away since Hurricane Katrina. But despite the dangerous job at hand, you don’t hesitate to help.
“It’s one of the seven cooperative principles: cooperation between cooperatives,” Meier said. “It is imperative that we help each other in these times. If we need help, they will send help this way too.”
Meier said it’s still unclear how long his crews will be in South Carolina, but it could be as long as three weeks.
