North Carolina news
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WNCN) — Continuous days and continuous weeks have kept people like Jared Roddy busy in western North Carolina.
Roddy, a customer delivery resource specialist with Duke Energy, recently worked to help restore power at Chimney Rock State Park. Roddy said the process to restore power to certain areas and bring communities a sense of normalcy hasn’t been easy.
“Access in this place is pretty hard,” he said. “We’re having to use side-by-sides and pickup trucks to get in and out. Using a helicopter, it helped speed up the process significantly.”
Helping since day one, Duke Energy’s Jeff Brooks said the power company has now restored electricity to 1.4 million homes in North Carolina—2.7 million across the Carolinas—since Hurricane Helene devastated communities one month ago.
“We’re making progress ahead of schedule at this point,“ Brooks said. “We are in a better place today than we even expected we might be a week or two ago.”
While progress has continued in the western part of the state, Brooks said there are still hundreds of customers without power. He explained many of the customers still without power are in areas that were hit the hardest by Helene including Bat Cave, Spruce Pine, Spindale, and Lake Lure. Brooks said crews in these locations are continuing to work around inaccessible roads and damaged infrastructure. In some cases, some of those customers lost their entire home.
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“Over the last week and a half, we really transitioned from our main power restoration campaign to really focusing on those communities that saw the most damage,” Brooks said. “Some of that has involved a lot of creativity, using their helicopters to bring in utility poles into hard hit areas, using tractor vehicles to get into the areas that you just can’t access. Like in any storm, when your facility is not safely able to receive power, we can’t reconnect that power until repairs are made and inspections are done.”
Brian Strong, the Director of North Carolina State Parks, said those crews also helped restore some power to Chimney Rock State Park. He said it’s been a huge piece of helping them return operations and services at their parks.
“These are challenging times,” Strong said. “I’ve been with the division for 24 years, to see the communities, to see the impact, the losses and lives that have been lost, it’s really tough and we know these communities are struggling to get back to normalcy.”
Strong said 13 units of the state park system remain closed west of I-77 and is hopeful to open certain areas in early November.
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“This is about the communities too,” he said. “We want to be sensitive, not opening where they’re not ready, where the resources aren’t ready, where the access isn’t there. We’re being very thoughtful in how we address that moving forward.”
Brooks said temporary substations are providing some immediate relief to some of their customers, but also said that it will take weeks—even months—to finish permanent repairs.
“We know that that this is more than just an inconvenience. This is a major disruption to the lives of people in those communities,” Brooks said. “Many of our line workers and tree workers have experienced loss themselves in these communities. They’ve been dealing with their own personal situations. It is very personal for them. This is home for them and they want to see these communities rebuilt.”
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