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Getting their feet wet
Santee Electric repair crews weren’t afraid to dive right in to get electricity restored after Hurricane Matthew.
Photo by Jonathan Gowdy, Santee Electric
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Working on the water
Pee Dee Electric Cooperative employee Chris Byrd “rides the lines” by boat, searching for damage as waters from the Pee Dee River flood areas near Nichols.
Photo by Van O’Cain
In many ways, Hurricane Matthew was the perfect storm—perfect, that is, for damaging the state’s largest utility network.
The slow-moving Category 1 hurricane churned off the South Carolina coast for 12 hours before coming ashore near McClellanville on Oct. 8, and the sustained winds and rain it created across the state delivered a one-two punch to the power-distribution network, says Todd Carter, vice president of loss control and training for The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, Inc.
“When you get 40-mph winds with saturated ground, trees give way and fall on power lines,” he says. “Then we had insult to injury. We had floods on top of a hurricane.”
Electric cooperatives build and maintain the state’s largest utility network, covering 70 percent of the state's land area with 74,000 miles of power lines. In the hardest-hit territories south of I-20, more than 300,000 co-op members were without power at the height of storm—the most outages since Hurricane Hugo. While cooperatives were prepared for the storm with extra lineworkers and equipment on hand, forests of fallen trees, washouts and flooding blocked repair crews from inspecting and repairing the damage.
Remarkably, service was restored across most of the state in little more than a week, Carter says, thanks to the cooperative spirit.
Coordinated by the state association of electric cooperatives, more than 150 lineworkers from northern parts of the state were released to assist co-ops with the greatest damage, and approximately 600 more lineworkers from cooperatives in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Arkansas arrived to help rebuild the system. In some of the hardest-hit areas of the Pee Dee, S.C. National Guard troops helped clear the way for co-op line crews to restore power.
“It took us four weeks to get everybody back on after Hugo, but we did it in about a week this time. It’s a remarkable achievement,” Carter says, noting that no co-op crews were injured in the recovery effort, despite working 16-hour days. “From my position, I get to see the co-ops come together—and they truly come together in something like this.”
