Hundreds of thousands still without power in the South
Hundreds of thousands of customers in the South are still without power over one week after Hurricane Helene made landfall.
More than 277,000 customers are in the dark in South Carolina and 230,000 are without power in North Carolina.
Another 200,000 are without power in Georgia.
"This has been a historic storm. We've never seen anything like this," Duke Energy spokesperson Bill Norton said. “The biggest challenge has been the unprecedented flooding. It’s not just poles and wires that are down -- it's the backbone of our system, the transmission infrastructure and substations."
Duke Energy has a "crew of 21,000 line workers, vegetation crews and more across the Carolinas," Norton said.
In North Carolina, crews have repaired more than 1.2 million power outages and are on track to restore an additional 27,000 customers by Friday night and another 69,000 in the hardest-hit areas by Sunday evening, Norton said on Friday.
The water line is almost to the top of the substation that serves Biltmore Village, North Carolina, and the substation will take three to four months to repair, Norton said.
Crews have wheeled in a 200,000-pound mobile substation to serve in the interim, Norton said, noting that it was a "slow, meticulous" process to get the mobile substation to the region because crews had to make sure the bridges hit by Helene could withstand it.
The mobile substation "will effectively allow us to bypass the substation for the next three to four months as we level it and build it again on higher ground," Norton said. "Those customers will have power even as we rebuild that substation."
