Editor's Note: In September 2024, Hurricane Helene put the cooperative spirit to the ultimate test, affecting more lives and destroying more electric cooperative property and infrastructure than any storm in co-op history. NRECA contributing writer Steven Johnson visited 13 co-ops in eight states, asking them to reflect on the storm, the restoration work and the lessons they learned in the process. To read the additional stories from his travels, visit electric.coop/helene.

It came down to a piece of aluminum foil.

A week after Hurricane Helene darkened every one of French Broad EMC's 41,000 meters in western North Carolina, weary lineworkers had energized a substation and were on the verge of joyously restoring power to the stricken community of Bakersville, population 450, when a fuse blew at 1 a.m.

Undeterred, CEO Jeff Loven remembered working on those types of circuit breakers earlier in his career.

“It's just a little small fuse you can't get anywhere," he said. He also didn't want the night to end on another note of frustration. Loven drove home, about a mile away, rigged a makeshift fuse, wedged it into place and smiled at the results.

“The whole town lit up. You could hear people screaming and yelling. And once we got that, then you know everybody's believing that we're going to start seeing some positive things happen," he said.

When a hurricane pounds your territory with 30 inches of rain, and 90-mph wind gusts, as Helene did at Marshall-based French Broad, when it demolishes homes and restaurants and bridges and everything it encounters, the smallest of victories register as major accomplishments and the ability to improvise becomes almost as important as a thoughtful response plan.

“We pride ourselves on restoration work, so we're accustomed to dealing with outages and major storms and just doing what we do," said Nathan Brown, vice president of engineering and operations at Laurens Electric Cooperative in Laurens, South Carolina, which restored 63,000 members without power in a shade less than two weeks. “But this was at such a different magnitude that it required some work on the fly, so we made some adjustments and some decisions that we didn't anticipate initially."

'We couldn't find them'

In this digital world, it's hard to imagine a scenario where the grid—and the ability to communicate—goes down, and you don't know what might be happening even just a few miles up the road.

“Moving forward, we are putting plans in place to beef up those LTE communications and build in redundancies so that we're able to switch seamlessly if one form proves to be inadequate."

At hard-hit French Broad EMC, cell service and the co-op's radio system were dead. Loven and co-op managers drove back and forth to the Yancey County line to get cell coverage and find out what was going on in the area.

“With regard to the technology, once you have it, you assume you've got it. All of a sudden, we didn't have cellphone coverage. It was like we were lost. We couldn't get ahold of anybody for a long time," he said.

That's one of the reasons Blue Ridge Energy turned to the air. “The storm hit on Friday, So we had a helicopter in the air on Saturday. We use helicopters for right-of-way trimming, and we were able to get one of the pilots to come in and primarily focus first on transmission," said Alan Merck, chief operating officer of the Lenoir, North Carolina-based co-op.

“After they surveyed all the transmission and reported back, they got on the three-phase circuits and the reports started coming back. Span after span after span. Pole after pole after pole. That was really the only way we could get our hands around the magnitude."

As a practical matter, the absence of communication put an untimely halt to the DoorDash-style operations of Little River Electric Cooperative in Abbeville, South Carolina, an isolated, wooded region thought to be off limits to hurricanes. For the first two nights, the co-op planned to ferry bagged dinners to workers in the field coping with a near-total system rebuild.

But where were they?

“We couldn't find them. They would say, 'Well, they're up on such and such a road somewhere.' 'Well, where on that road? I don't even know where that road is,'" Chad Stone, then interim general manager, said in frustration. “You couldn't call them and nobody had lights. It's not like you could see road signs. You would just kind of ride down this road until you might see a spotlight. You may have a signal and you may not. That was hard."

There were no lights or cell service either in Canoochee EMC's territory, based in Reidsville in eastern Georgia. The co-op lost power to about 90% of its more than 30,000 meters. Communications specialist Joseph Sikes said some relief came in the form of satellite phones provided by Georgia Transmission.

“We used as many phones as we could get ahold of. It took a while to get the quantity we needed. But we had to come in and relearn how to work a different kind of phone. It was not intuitive after you've used a smartphone," he said.

As a result, conveying messages to work crews became a sort of throwback to the days of cruising the highways. “It was kind of a step back into a few decades ago, where you weren't exactly sure where someone was, but you had to go drive around. We faced that pretty much every day during lunch," Sikes said.

“We've used it not only for emergencies like Helene but Tropical Storm Fred as well," said Mitch Bearden, chief communications officer. “It's been helpful for when we need to move equipment around or take something offline. We can pull in the mobile substation, hook it up and be able to work where we need to."

'Old-fashioned technology'

Storm restoration technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years with more precise mapping, enhancements to SCADA and texting in the field. But walkie-talkies still have their place.

When French Broad EMC went down, a team of lineworkers from Union Power Cooperative in Monroe, North Carolina, east of Charlotte, was among the first responders. Just working the first day in Burnsville with no power, no running water and, importantly, no ATV, it was clear that communications would be the most immediate stumbling block.

“We're down in the valley and had no phone service and we're trying to get some people's power on before we went home," said crew supervisor Josh Morrison. “The farther we walked, the more damage we saw, and we had no way to call back to get more material. So, every time somebody was having to hike back up the mountain just to get some material, like an old courier service."

That's where walkie-talkies came into play. The Union Power crew didn't have it easy that first night—the nearest accommodations were at a hotel in Erwin, Tennessee, a close to two-hour ride in the darkness of mountain roads. A call to headquarters and Union Power dispatched every walkie-talkie and handheld device it had to lineworkers 160 miles away.

“It was a big help. Their antennas were down, their radios were for their own system and didn't even work in some places. You'd have to drive down the road and get clearance to make a line hot and then drive back where you were working," said line superintendent David Medlock.

It was part of what Medlock called a “daily" need to be creative or imaginative, given the horrific circumstances.

In one instance, Morrison, riding ahead to lay out a game plan, returned to summon Medlock and look over a vast expanse of waste.

“He comes back down the hill, gets me and we drive up there. The road stops. A million-dollar home and that's it," Medlock said. “There's no yard, there's no septic, there's nothing to drive on. On the map where the pole line used to be, it's not even there. The pole is way down the hill. You can see it hitting the transformer sticking out of a big mud wash. There was no earth to put the poles in. They couldn't redo the house."

With limited accessibility and difficult terrain, a lot of old-fashioned techniques became new again. Line superintendent Andy Newsome, part of the second wave that Union sent to French Broad, said basic rigging skills of the kind he learned from veteran lineworkers played a big part in turning the lights back on.

“You're talking about floating poles in and stuff like that, and pulling poles up with ropes," he said. “For some of the newer guys, this was their first storm. You start talking about doing this and they're like, 'What? How are you going to do that?'

“For instance, it might be tempting to cut wire that's on the ground and start from scratch," Newsome said. “You don't want to cut that. It's got to go back to the way it was and it has to be re-rigged to get it back up there on the poles. A lot of the young guys learned things we were shown by older linemen and it'll come in handy sometime."

Making do in the office

Catastrophe is every bit the mother of invention as necessity. A case in point: Helene was supposed to skirt the territory of Aiken Electric Cooperative, north of Augusta, Georgia, until it slightly altered direction and took down power and office communications.

With the motor running, Daniele Ligons, manager of marketing and strategic services, sat in the front seat of her 2019 Honda Civic so she could charge her smartphone, talk to her marketing coordinator and somehow keep in touch with Aiken's members.

“Of course, while I'm talking to her and trying to respond to members and trying to figure out what we should do with our posts and trying to figure out how we should make the media aware of what's happening, my phone is dying just as fast as I could charge it. So it was very interesting," Ligons said.

But her patchwork job was essential because for the first couple of days, Facebook was the co-op's sole lifeline to the 49,000 members out of power, representing about 92% of Aiken's system. As she noted, even in the direst of circumstances, members check in on Facebook to see what's going on in their area or ask why a given bucket truck drove past their house. “Having done a lot of storms over the years, if you don't get ahead of that, you'll never be able to catch up," she said.

“Always be prepared, always have a plan," she said. “Even if things don't go as planned and wind up a lot more challenging, and it's a larger disaster than you think, don't ever underestimate what you're capable of doing."

Blue Ridge Energy ended up hosting 640 lineworkers and related personnel; it has about 52 lineworkers on staff, which meant tossing aside corporate job descriptions.

“They were doing laundry, they were running meals and trying to help and support any way they could to take a little load off of somebody else. We still had billing to do. We still had work to do. But everybody just pulled together and supported one another," Merck said.

At Rutherford EMC in Forest City, North Carolina, you would think India Francis had enough hassles to worry about in her eighth month of pregnancy. Add to that her role as a purchasing agent during the worst storm in the co-op's history, needing to find poles, splices and record quantities of materials for three warehouses with no cellphone service or office systems.

“I couldn't even get online to get materials. I can't make contact with our vendors to get materials, which means I also can't get in contact with our other warehouses to get them materials. It was very interesting those first couple days and then it never let up. It was crazy," she said.

Her improvised solution was a legal pad. Francis wrote what she needed, took a picture of it on her phone and tried to find a signal somewhere where she could upload it to a vendor. “There was one place in the warehouse where everybody was fighting for one bar. We ordered more material in the first two weeks than I typically do in three months. Pallets of splices … we don't order pallets of splices. But it worked. There really wasn't anything to be sent back. We had not overextended ourselves, even though it seemed like it."

New challenges

Helene was the first hurricane to produce a dramatic test to multiple fiber networks across multiple states. Co-op involvement in the broadband field has increased sharply in recent years, including at Tri-County Electric Cooperative in Madison, Florida, near Helene's Sept. 26 landfall in nearby Perry as a Category 4 hurricane.

It has been deploying a full fiber-to-the-home system across its three-county service territory, creating a new set of challenges and expectations as members look to the co-op to restore both power and internet quickly.

“They're asking, 'Will the internet come back on as soon as power is restored?' That's a matter of member education," said Kaitlynn Culpepper, community relations director.

So is educating members about the nature of fiber lines, which some might mistake for fallen electrical lines when they venture outside after a storm.

“If you cut a tree off a fiber line, it's going to pop back up in the air. It's not going to just stay down like a power line would. That has safety implications, so we're educating people on that."

It's part of a learning curve, Culpepper said, that comes with the bitter experience of living with hurricanes—three in 13 months for Tri-County, including Idalia in 2023 and Debby and Helene in 2024. Preparation is essential, she said, but so is the ability to change gears as needed.

“A lot is going to happen and there a lot of moving pieces," she said. “We're very fortunate here at Tri-County that our CEO Julius Hackett has a very calm demeanor. If he's calm, we're all calm and that makes a huge difference when you can approach things with a clear mind and focus on what you need to do."