Tyler Manick, a Duke Energy journeyman based out of Marion, North Carolina, is one of thousands of linemen working to restore power in Southern communities since Hurricane Helene devastated a huge swath of the region this past week.
“Even when I’ve traveled out of state on storms, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Manick says. “I guess too, because it’s my hometown. I mean, my mom’s house is destroyed. It’s different because it’s home.”
Jeff Brooks, a grid specialist with Duke, says 20,000 linemen are spread across Duke’s multi-state coverage area, working with tractors and trucks to reach some communities, and even helicopters with chainsaws to cut branches hanging over power lines. In many cases, they’ve set up temporary mobile substations that deliver power to areas they can reach.
Hurricane Helene made landfall last Thursday in Florida’s Big Bend region and then continued as a tropical storm into Georgia and the Appalachian South, killing at least 194 people and leaving millions without power. Brooks says that in Duke’s coverage zones, power has since been restored to 1.5 million people, especially around urban areas like Asheville. But the small, hard to-reach communities in the mountains are another story. In some places, the entire grid will need to be rebuilt.
“Power restoration is challenging on a good day in these remote areas with rough terrain,” Brooks says. “And then you take a hurricane that’s typically on the coast and you put it in the mountains? It’s rebuilding an entire community, not just electric infrastructure—we’re talking roads, we’re talking water, we’re talking everything.”
Matt Ward, a lineman from Old Fort, North Carolina, sums up the scope of the challenge: “Where we had poles before, it’s just nothing but water—we have nowhere to put the poles.” Like Manick, he feels the crisis on a personal level. “It hits home real hard. I just gave another lineman my generator so he could have power for his freezer to get food for his family.”
Duke Energy works across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Here’s the map of current outages in the Carolinas.
“What keeps me motivated is trying to help those folks that I go to church with, the folks that I see in the grocery store, the folks that I see in the bank,” Manick says. “Faces that I’ve looked at my whole life. I can’t save lives, but I can try to get their lights on.”