(Restoration efforts in Mercer County, West Virginia. Courtesy: Sophia Fasano)

Damage from Hurricane Helene becomes more clear days after the storm struck the southeast U.S., leaving more than 1.1 million customers still without power as crews work in difficult and hard-to-access-areas. After making landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, Helene went far inland- affecting Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia. Deaths have been reported in all six states.

Duke Energy suffered severe damages to infrastructure- including submerged substations, thousands of downed utility poles, and downed transmission towers. They will need to completely rebuild electrical equipment, including substations, but expect to restore the majority of customer outages by Friday night.

Georgia Power’s extensive damage estimates include more than 8,000 power poles, more than 21,000 spans of wire (approximately equivalent to 1000 miles), more than 1,500 transformers, and thousands of trees on power lines. Crews are hard at work restoring transmission lines, fixing substations, and repairing main lines into neighborhoods and business districts before they can replace poles on the streets.

According to poweroutage.us, there are still at least 877,125 outages still being reported in areas affected by the storm.

Read more here: Days later, scope of Helene damage becomes more clear (power-grid.com)