Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida Thursday evening as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph, leaving millions without power and killing at least 25 people as it progressed north, ravaging the southeastern United States.
As of 2 pm ET Friday, nearly 5 million homes and businesses have reported outages, including more than 4.2 million in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia according to poweroutage.us.
| States by customers out | |
| South Carolina | 1,265,747 |
| Georgia | 962,095 |
| North Carolina | 910,931 |
| Florida | 846,747 |
| Virginia | 227,145 |
More than 200,000 customers are without power in Kentucky and more than 100,000 in Tennessee. West Virginia and Ohio are reporting tens of thousands of outages as the storm’s remnants continue northwest.
Soon after it crossed over land, Helene weakened to a tropical storm, with its maximum sustained winds falling to 70 mph (110 kph). At 5 a.m., the storm was about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Macon, Georgia, and about 100 miles (165 kilometers) southeast of Atlanta, moving north at 30 mph (48 kph), the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported.
The system continues to weaken as it moves north and drops heavy rain over the Appalachian Mountains, with the risk of mudslides and flash flooding.
Before the storm made landfall, utilities were warning about “widespread damage” and extended outages, and thousands of customers were already beginning to lose power in the southeast. Duke Energy Florida readied 8,000 workers, and Duke Energy Carolinas said more than 10,000 workers were prepped and staged before the storm hit. Workers include lineworkers, tree trimmers, damage assessors and support personnel. Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) said it had assembled a restoration workforce of “thousands” and is pre-positioning crews, equipment and supplies to restore power.
Helene is the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an above-normal hurricane season with 17-25 named storms this season, including 8-13 hurricanes, and 4-7 of those becoming major hurricanes. This year’s forecast predicts around 30% more storm activity compared to the number of storms predicted last year.
With the projected increase of storms on its mind, Duke Energy has been strengthening the electric grid against severe weather, upgrading thousands of poles and wires to increase reliability and better withstand storms, strategically placing outage-prone lines underground in some areas, managing trees and vegetation, and installing smart, self-healing technology that can automatically detect power outages and quickly restore power when an outage occurs.
The utility claims that in 2023, self-healing technology helped to avoid more than 1.5 million customer outages, saving more than 3.6 million hours of total lost outage time across the company’s six-state service area. Nearly 50% of Duke Energy customers are now impacted by self-healing and automated restoration technologies, more than double the number of customers served by smart restoration systems two years ago.
The company also recently completed a multi-year modernization project to construct seven new grid control centers across its six-state service area. These facilities are meant to help manage crews and outage response after storms, and can monitor millions of data points across the power grid in real time.
Duke Energy maintains more than 17,000 employees and contractors ready to respond to outages when storms strike, and partnerships with peer utilities provide additional resources to shorten response times.
This article contains reporting from the Associated Press.
