Recovery from Helene

[Big_Al]

I've been watching the electrical outage map since Helene passed through. The number of customers without power in North Carolina is now down to about 81,000 and over half of those are in the county where Asheville is situated. Given the extent of devastation there, I'm not surprised.

I think overall the response of the electrical utilities and the effectiveness of their mutual aid plans is outstanding. I recall that outages in Puerto Rico after they were hit by a hurricane extended in some cases to over a half year.

Big Al

[Steve Miller]

The amount of work it must take to fix that many outages must be staggering.

Good work, crews!

[Piano*Dad]

The Puerto Rico situation was exacerbated, in part, by the Trump administration.

I'm intrigued that the entire Blue Ridge Parkway through NC and VA has been shut down, and remains shut down. We had little to no damage in the Skyline Drive area of Virginia, so I'm thinking this is an exercise in extreme caution and elaborate inspection.

[Daniel]

Yes, well, Puerto Rico is, of course, an island, and got hit by a Category 5 hurricane. It was utterly devastated. It didn't, of course, have adequate resources.

FEMA came and their workers had luxury stays in the best hotels in the capitol. Their performance was no different after the Lahaina fire.

I'd bet my left arm that life in that territory was set back a decade or more as the world's media's attention moved on.

The big white medical ship with a red cross on it that never took on an injured resident was an interesting piece of theater.

However, I'd also bet someone has or will do some investigative journalism on that storm. It was a monster.

I can't wait for hurricane season to be over. This has been the most miserable one in my memory.

[Big_Al]

When I looked today, no state has more than 10,000 outages. There are pockets in two North Carolina counties of substantial outage numbers. I wonder if the customers to be served even exist in some cases.

All in all, the recovery of power after two hurricanes has been nearly heroic.

Big Al

[ShiroKuro]

@Big_Al said in Recovery from Helene:

I wonder if the customers to be served even exist in some cases.

Do you mean, the locations marked as having an outage are places where people have left or passed away?

I'm pretty sure that Duke (one of the main providers in that area) always counts their outages by service addresses, fwiw.

[wtg]

@ShiroKuro said in Recovery from Helene:

places where people have left or passed away

Or perhaps a bit less drastic, though still a tragedy, the house that was connected to the grid is no longer there. I saw lots of them floating away down a river, or sliding down a mountain.

[Big_Al]

@ShiroKuro
I was thinking more along the lines of the structure that was being served no longer existing or being in habitable condition. Fatalities may account for ongoing outages in possibly hundreds of few cases, but not in the several thousands.

Big Al

[ShiroKuro]

Right, I wasn't thinking about all the structures that just got washed away. It's heartbreaking to think about.