Minnesota electric workers travel to South Carolina for Hurricane Helene relief efforts
MINNEAPOLIS — It's been six days since Hurricane Helene made landfall along the Gulf Coast and many communities in the south are struggling to recover.
Across the Carolinas and Georgia, more than 1.1 million homes are still without power as of Wednesday evening, according to PowerOutage.us.
"You know the event is bad when you're coming from Minnesota and driving a day and a half to get down there and do the help," said Joe Miller, the Director of Communications for the Minnesota Rural Electric Association.
The sheer amount of wind and rain has left millions in the dark, and the terrain is only making matters worse.
"It's a very mountainous region in the Carolinas. To even get in to make repairs, trees are down, lines are down. They can't even get through, so there's a lot of work just to get to the point of restoring some of those areas," Miller said.
That's why more than 70 lineworkers from 18 different electric cooperatives in Minnesota are joining power crews from at least 15 states to get the job done.
"Anytime you're dealing with power lines you're not familiar is one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, when it's on the ground, everything is in shambles and disarray, it's a really challenging process when you have to pick up all those pieces and try to put them back together," said Dan Meier, Operations Manager for Steele-Waseca Cooperative Electric.
Steele-Waseca in Owatonna is sending four lineworkers. They are some of the last of the Minnesotans to hit the road to South Carolina. Meier said this is the first time his team has been deployed this far away since Hurricane Katrina. But despite the dangerous job at hand, there's no hesitation to help.
"It's one of the seven cooperative principles — cooperation among cooperatives," Meier said. "It's imperative we help each other in these times. When we need help, they're gonna send help this way too."
Meier said it's still unclear how long his crews will be in upstate South Carolina, but it could be as long as three weeks.