Power could be out for weeks in parts of SC after Helene. Meet the people fixing it
Garret Hammond wakes on a cot in an office-turned-barracks, where he has lived for the past several days. Outside, the area around his western South Carolina hometown is rubble.
Power lines hang over yards like weeping willows, wooden beams are splintered and strewn across the roads. And tens of thousands of people are still without power here.
“I never expected to see anything like this,” said Hammond, who has lived in the small town of Edgefield, a stone’s throw from the Georgia border, all his life. For the last four years, he’s worked as a lineman for the Aiken Electric Cooperative, which serves Edgefield, doing standard repairs to utility poles and power lines. But now, the aftermath of Hurricane Helene has created a much larger job, with much higher stakes.
Statewide, nearly half a million power outages were still active as of Wednesday morning. Almost all of those outages are in the western portion of the state. At noon Wednesday, Edgefield County still had 8,875 customers without power, and Aiken County had 50,300, according to poweroutage.us.
In the small Edgefield community, an estimated 300 utility poles operated by the electric cooperative were torn up, snapped in half or otherwise decimated.
Hammond said it could take weeks before his own power at home is turned back on, and so he and many of his colleagues spend their nights in accounting offices and training rooms at the electric cooperative’s headquarters, where at least there are hot showers. He expects to be at it for a while.
Unexpected devastation
The sun bounces off Ellis Crawford’s white hard-hat as he tilts his head up toward Hammond, who is bobbing up and down in the basin of a bucket truck, maybe 30 feet up in the air.
“I don’t understand why it has that give,” Crawford says to another lineman, Dilan Havird, as they inspect the condition of the power line Hammond and a second aerial lineman are installing.
“They’re going to have to untie it,” Havird responds, practically shouting over the constant rumble of the large trucks elevating his coworkers.
They’re trouble-shooting. The crew has to ensure the newly placed power cable is tight but not taut, flexible but not firm. It has to dangle at just the right height.
“Hold up,” Crawford shouts up at Hammond, before once again assessing the position of the draped cable. “Alright, you look pretty good.”
Hammond fastens the cable and then clips it, letting the excess fall to the earth below.
Today, yesterday, tomorrow, and beyond, this four-man Aiken Electric Cooperative crew will work between 16- and 17-hour days, doing largely the same thing all across Edgefield and Aiken counties.
“I’m supposed to be at the beach,” joked Havird, who celebrates his third wedding anniversary Wednesday. But instead of a sunny vacation, Havird is baking under his hard hat.
Despite the joke, he’s grateful. His is one of the lucky homes in Aiken with power. So he’s pulled out air mattresses, cots, couches and anything he can turn into a bed to let other linemen, family and friends stay at his house.
For Crawford, this storm is nothing new. He’s worked as a lineman for almost 20 years, previously in the Lowcountry and briefly in Florida. He rates this storm a 5 out of 10, but for the Aiken area, he knows this level of damage is unheard of.
And while by some measures Helene can’t compare to the devastation left by Hurricane Hugo, by others it was worse.
Hurricane Helene caused the deaths of at least 36 people in South Carolina — that’s one more than the 35 deaths caused by Hugo in 1989.
The damage across South Carolina is severe, but the linemen say in Edgefield it’s like nothing they could have imagined. The Electric Cooperatives have hired hundreds of contract-linemen from out of state. People are here from Maine, Virginia, Alabama, Texas.
More than 500 contractors were working with the cooperative in the Aiken area to help restore power by Tuesday night. By this weekend, they expect to have a total of 1,000 people in the field as more contractors arrive in the state.
A spokesperson for the Aiken cooperative said rather than repairing damage, the utility is having to rebuild most of the power system.
“What you’re not seeing is just as alarming,” as the visible damage, Aiken Electric Cooperative CEO Gary Stooksbury wrote Tuesday on Facebook. “Underground cables flooded beyond repair, entire substations submerged in water, transformers crushed by debris, and access routes completely washed out. The destruction from Hurricane Helene runs deep — more than what meets the eye.”
That deep damage means that while power is expected to be restored in the Midlands and other parts of South Carolina this week, the linemen working in Edgefield, who also don’t have power at home, say for them it could be weeks.
Appreciation?
All of the linemen who spoke with The State said they feel the love from their community, despite online groaning about the pace of their work.
“I’ve never really thought about it the way I think of it now,” said Kord Williams, who has worked for the electric company for four years. Before, it was a job but he didn’t think beyond where he was assigned to go one day or the next. Now, he knows better.
A red Chevy stuffed with people rolls up to the men. As they pass the crew they shout praises and “We love you” and then they even stop the truck to fist-bump Crawford for a job well done.
Williams recalls how recently they restored electricity in a nearby neighborhood. “They’re just outside throwing their hands up” saying thank you, he said.
Online, residents have speculated that power companies sent linemen to Florida before the storm, leaving South Carolina without their expertise when the storm hit. The electric cooperative and Dominion Energy both adamantly deny that accusation. The linemen say they aren’t frustrated to hear residents complain — most of the men are also tired of not having power. But they ask for patience.
It takes about three hours to replace an electrical pole, not including the time it takes to reinstall the cables, connect the transformer and do it all safely and without cutting corners.
The crew doesn’t break until they’re satisfied with the job they’ve just done. When they do finally take lunch, they’ve been working for at least seven straight hours.
Sometimes they get a bag lunch from the cooperative, but today volunteers have dropped off a case brimming with foil-wrapped hot dogs and a separate cooler topped with Gatorade.
It’s more than the crew can eat. One of the men walks over to the house next door, behind where they just finished replacing the power line, and invites a family staying there to share lunch. The house is without power and the family is grateful for hot food.
A boy fills his arms with hotdogs until he can’t carry any more. As he walks away, Havird shouts to him, “We’ve got like 50 Gatorades here.”
“50?” the boy asks, intrigued, then walks over and adds the sports drink to his stack.
Tonight, this home will have power.
This story was originally published October 2, 2024 at 1:11 PM.
