By Laila Kearney
(Reuters) -Restoring power to parts of the rural United States could take several weeks after Hurricane Helene's high winds and flooding decimated stretches of the southeast electrical grid, utility officials said on Tuesday.
Helene, which barreled north after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, ripped away thousands of miles of transmission lines and power poles in hard-to-reach parts of the country, members of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said on a call.
"I've been in this business for 38 years, and I've never seen anything like it," said Dennis Chastain, CEO of Georgia Electric Membership Corp. "It is devastation that's hard to describe."
Local electric cooperatives, which are owned by their customers, cover more than half of the country's landscape.
Georgia's transmission provider for the state's electric co-ops had 166 distribution stations out during the peak of the storm. In South Carolina, Helene wiped out at least 2,000 power poles, said Michael Couick, who heads that state's association of co-ops.
In an area around the Blue Ridge Mountains, energy workers are attempting to rebuild 7,300 miles (11,748 km) of transmission line, which is a length that could almost cover the diameter of earth, Couick said.
The rebuilding will require scaling mountainsides and drilling into solid rock, but only after accessing roads that may have been washed away by the storm's flooding, Couick said.
"When we're thinking about this rebuild, we're thinking about some of the most remote territory in this country," he added.
The southeast region's biggest investor-owned electric utilities, including Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) and Southern Co (NYSE:SO), which shut coal and nuclear power plant units due to the storm, also had hefty rebuilding tasks in front of them.
Duke, the largest utility covering North Carolina and South Carolina, still has nearly 650,000 customers without power as of Tuesday after restoring electricity to 1.6 million homes and business in those states.
Investor-owned electric utilities have the largest share of customers in the country, with cooperatives and municipal utilities taking up the rest.
"While it will be a long road to recovery, requiring significant rebuilding in many places, we will persist until the job is done,” said Scott Corwin, CEO of the American Public Power Association.
More than 1.4 million electric customers across 10 states were still without power five days after Helene touched down in Florida.