By the time that Hurricane Helene made its way hundreds of miles inland on September 27, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. But Helene remained unusually expansive and strong, fueled by the warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm brought high winds and catastrophic flooding, knocking out power for more than 2 million Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas, and tearing through a region of the country that wasn’t widely seen as vulnerable to hurricane damage: the Mountain South. Asheville, North Carolina, the city hardest hit, had even appeared on lists of “climate havens” considered comparatively safe from the natural disasters whose impacts are intensified by global warming.
Over the course of the following week, more than 50,000 utility workers, with crews from 41 U.S. states and Canada, set about the heroic work to restore power. In some areas, they even transported power poles by helicopter where roads remained impassable. By Saturday, service had been restored to more than 90 percent of the customers who lost power. But some of the remaining outages may prove harder to repair, because th... Read more
