CEC and VA Linemen Rose to the Challenge After Hurricane Helene
Speak with the Community Electric linemen who responded to power restoration efforts in western Virginia and North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and the same word pops up quickly in the conversation: terrain.
“The first day in North Carolina, I thought, ‘Goodness gracious! These are not foothills; these are mountains.’ It was a rude awakening,” CEC journeyman Daniel Hobson said.
Journeyman Austin Williams echoed Hobson’s statement. “It was right there in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we had to climb quite a bit of it,” Williams said. “A job that would take roughly an hour or two on our system would take five or six hours there” due to the multiple challenges of accessing a repair site on foot while hauling equipment, transporting new utility poles to replace broken ones, and setting and rewiring the poles to restore power to that segment.
“The last job we did (in southwestern Virginia) we worked for six hours and only got about two houses back on” because of the sparse population there, apprentice lineman Robb Darden said. “That’s just the mountain terrain. It’s crazy the way it is like that.”
The efforts made by Hobson, Williams and Darden are the most recent in a long history of recovery and restoration support that Community Electric has provided to other cooperatives, just as CEC has received help restoring power in years past. “Cooperation Among Cooperatives” is the sixth of seven foundational principles that guide rural electric cooperatives across the United States, and mutual assistance in the aftermath of extreme weather events is a hallmark of this philosophy.
“You want to see people be helped, especially in a situation like that,” Williams said. “We didn’t see the worst of the devastation where we were compared to Asheville and Chimney Rock (N.C.), but it felt good to help these people who’d been without power and were waiting for it to come back on. I’d like our members to know that we put in the same effort to help out others as we would them.”
Williams and Hobson were deployed for nearly two weeks about 70 miles northeast of Asheville in and around Lenoir, N.C., the headquarters of the Blue Ridge Energy cooperative. Blue Ridge serves about 78,000 meters over 1,500 square miles. More than 80 percent of its members lost power as a result of the hurricane. Prior to assisting Blue Ridge, Hobson had spent two days with Darden assisting Craig-Botetourt Electric Cooperative to the west of Roanoke, Va., before a truck malfunction forced Darden to return to CEC. Craig-Botetourt serves about 7,300 members in seven counties – six in Virginia and one in West Virginia – spanning about 1,300 square miles. More than 4,600 of its members lost power.
Topography partly tells what the linemen encountered. In contrast to the territory served by Community Electric, where Windsor’s elevation is 79 feet above sea level, Craig-Botetourt’s main office in New Castle is 1,350 feet above sea level, while Blue Ridge Energy’s offices in Lenoir are 1,168 feet above sea level. Still, numbers don’t begin to convey the devastation that Hurricane Helene unleashed on the communities served by Blue Ridge and Craig-Botetourt.
“The destruction didn’t cover the entire area where we were, but if it was near water, it was the worst stuff I’ve ever seen,” Hobson said. “A lot of the other guys had been to the Hurricane Katrina restoration, and they would say, ‘This is worse than that.’
All told, about 500 line technicians assisted Blue Ridge Energy, and the hours and work they logged border on the staggering. They would wake up around 5 or 5:30 a.m., report to the office headquarters for food and marching orders, and be in the field the remainder of the day, not returning to their hotel until 9 or 10 p.m. Often, because of roadway debris and other access challenges, they would have to make multiple trips hundreds of yards on foot hauling 50 to 60 pounds of equipment at a time.
“We mostly had down wires and broken cross arms,” Hobson said. “We set quite a few poles too, considering we had just a two-man crew. That’s not a normal practice.”
They and other crews benefited from the common use of a “digger derrick” truck that features an auger to dig holes and help set poles. The truck’s driver “bounced around between a lot of crews. We got a lot more done than the average for two people because of him,” Hobson said.
Williams described the work as “definitely exhausting.” Crews make a purposeful effort to maintain their safety focus by communicating regularly with one another and taking breaks whenever needed.
“You do pre-job briefings and you try to keep morale up too,” Williams said. “If you go on a storm response like that, it can get draining and after a while there can be arguments. You try to have a good time and stay positive, and that goes a long way with the safety part too.”
One bright spot was that, once the storm passed, the weather was excellent. Temperatures were moderate and the skies were clear. The professionalism and organizational skills of the host cooperatives, including meals, also made the deployment less burdensome, as did the attitude of the people directly affected by the hurricane.
“Our members were great,” said Eric Helton, the Blue Ridge “bird dog” who guided Hobson and Williams throughout their deployment. “Some of them had lost loved ones and everything they had, but they would give us their water to help us keep going. That makes you feel good.”
Himself a former lineman who now is a senior substation technician with Blue Ridge, Helton was effusive in his praise for Hobson and Williams.
“I can’t say enough good things about those guys. They were both awesome,” Helton said. “When you have crews from other cooperatives with you, it seems like things always go smoother. They understood what we needed right when they got here. They showed respect for people’s property, and if a member came out asking questions, they were professional in speaking with them. They also had great attitudes; they came in and really wanted to help.”
Maiya Ashby, the communications director at Craig-Botetourt, viewed the help from Darden and Hobson much the same way.
“What really made it difficult for us was that the damage was so widespread affecting all seven counties,” she said. “We could not have restored power without the mutual aid support from the three cooperatives and two other local companies that help us throughout the year with right of way maintenance. CEC of course was one of the first to respond, and their assistance was much needed and so appreciated.”
Like Helton, Ashby felt the storm brought out the best in community members, churches and other institutions that united to support the linemen providing assistance with meals, showers and other appreciative gestures.
For Darden, two and one-half years into his career with CEC, this was his second restoration deployment. More so than his first, this assignment drove home for him the sacrifices that so many linemen make to assist fellow cooperatives.
“I know I was only gone for a couple days, but you hear other linemen talking about buddies who are spending time away from their families and missing stuff like the birth of their children back home. I’m only 22, and it really hit me. I can’t even imagine that.”
The response to Hurricane Helene was unique in that all 16 cooperatives in the Virginia, Maryland and Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives (VMDAEC) provided assistance, said J.T. Jacobs, the association’s manager of safety training and the area administrator for its Rural Electric Safety Achievement Program. Usually, a cooperative has to wait to commit response resources until it knows how a storm will affect its system. With Helene, the storm track was sufficiently far west that 14 cooperatives were able to commit resources well ahead of time, with the remaining two co-ops sending assistance once they had restored power within their systems.
Response planning also differed this time due to Helene’s projected path. Typically, coordination calls to determine what resources can be made available don’t occur until three or four days prior to a storm arriving. In this instance, those preparedness conversations took place more than a week in advance, Jacobs said, and ultimately about 150 line workers from throughout the VMDAEC assisted.
“Members should know that we prepare not just locally or with our own cooperatives,” he said. “We prepare with other states every year. We want to be well prepared and plan ahead so that once something does occur, we can help efficiently. We practice and prepare beforehand.”
Of the Helene experience, Hobson said the toughest part was the return to Windsor once his two-week deployment ended.
“As long as I keep going, I’m not going to get all that tired,” he said. “The only time I really got tired was on the drive home, which was like five and a half hours. That was brutal. It hit me all at once.”