JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Thousands of people in the Carolinas are still without power more than two weeks after the remnants of Hurricane Helene moved through. People in the mountains of western North Carolina have been especially hard to reach, and it is not clear when power will fully be restored. Katie Myers with Blue Ridge Public Radio and Grist has been following the story. Hey, Katie.
KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: Hey. How are you doing?
SUMMERS: I am well. Katie, can you just start by telling us where things stand now with these power outages?
MYERS: Well, a week after Helene tore through, a million customers in the Carolinas had no power. Right now power is still out for about 14,000 in western North Carolina. These are mostly remote counties far up in the Appalachian Mountains. It's been really tough for utility crews to get to these places and also for residents to leave to get to places that might have power. Even in some parts of Asheville, electricity is still out. So people are getting by using generators. A few days ago, I visited an independent senior living facility that was running on a generator. And I have to mention generator power isn't as strong or as reliable as the grid, and that can really be dangerous for people with medical devices.
SUMMERS: Right. Help us understand. What are the obstacles to restoring electric supply? There's obviously the terrain, as you mentioned.
MYERS: Yeah. So as someone who drags my car around a lot of country roads, I also know that many of these roads were not great to begin with, and this storm was all it took to slide them off the mountain. In this part of North Carolina, almost all distribution lines are above ground and could get taken out by falling trees and wind. This area isn't used to the kind of wind and rain that Helene brought, so utilities haven't been focused on moving lines underground like they do in places like Florida. Plus, that's really expensive to do. And then there's the issue of flooding. Mud, grit and water might have gotten into the wiring. That would make it a fire hazard to turn the power back on. So every building has to be inspected by a licensed electrician if it got hit by water.
SUMMERS: Katie, hearing you describe that, it sounds like a lot of utility workers - they might be busy for quite a long time.
MYERS: Yeah. There's thousands of them. They've been out there working around the clock. And I should mention the grid is way more than just power lines. There were substations here that were left underwater, meaning they were completely taken out, since electricity and water don't mix. And they can take a year to rebuild, sometimes more. Duke Energy is the biggest utility in the region, and it's been trucking in mobile substations to some places, but it's a temporary fix.
SUMMERS: And what has Duke Energy had to say about the timeline, how long it might take to get the lights back on?
MYERS: So Duke spokespeople told me that they had hoped to restore power in 90% of places easily reached by road within the first week, though it's not clear why some people in, say, Asheville still don't have electricity. Areas where the infrastructure was totally destroyed and need to be rebuilt from the ground up will take much longer. The company did not give a clear timeline for any of this.
SUMMERS: So then what can utilities do to try to prevent this kind of outage up in the mountains?
MYERS: Earlier in the year, Duke said it had been working to harden the grid, building technology to automate power outage reports and otherwise expedite repairs in advance of what we knew was going to be an intense hurricane season. And there are ideas for making the grid itself more resilient, but many of them are expensive and require outside investment. One option is micro grids, which are local electric grids disconnected from the larger system. These could potentially be solar powered. This will allow them to keep working as long as the sun is shining. Duke installed one of these micro grids in Hot Springs, North Carolina, last year, actually. The system worked during Helene but didn't have enough battery storage to last multiple days, so it was more of a temporary holdover.
SUMMERS: Katie Myers is a climate reporter with Blue Ridge Public Radio and Grist. Katie, thank you.
MYERS: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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