As Blue Ridge Electric enters 2025, we're still confronted with ample evidence of the most impactful event ever to come our way. One my daily commute to and from the co-op office, I see signs of the devastated landscape left in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Roadside brush piles, mighty trees uprooted and lying on the ground and severely damaged homes and other structures are still common sights.
The cooperative's response to this historic storm, which resulted in 90% of our members losing power, was to marshal all the resources we possibly could to attack the restoration process. More than 600 operations employees representing 15 of our sister co-ops - some from as far away as South Dakota - joined in the massive repair effort. Our on-site employees and contract workers swelled the total number of crew members to more than 800.
One stark indicator of the severity of this storm was the final count of nearly 1,000 broken wood poles recorded on the Blue Ridge system. That statistic is significant for any number of reasons. Here are two I'd mention:
- That number is three times the number of broken wood poles that were counted some years ago in what had been, up until Helene, our worst storm emergency.
- The replacement of a broken pole typically requires the labor of four linemen and takes about four times as long to address, compared to an outage that doesn't involve a broken pole.
Those are only a couple of factors that made this a weather event to remember. Other major challenges were the feeding, housing and supplying of an army of workers. Those were also monumental tasks.
Ultimately, we were able to restore service to the majority of our members in less than 12 days. However, there were a couple of communities in the northernmost sections of the Blue Ridge territory that were especially hard hit. So much destruction was inflicted on our facilities in these locations that crews had to build long stretches of new power lines just to get those folks back in service. The lights finally came on again for them on the 14th day.
In the aftermath of this challenging system-wide situation, we've received so many comments from members expressing praise and gratitude for the tremendous effort that brought this massive outage to an end. I am grateful for each of you who took the opportunity to contact us.
What the level of devastation was apparent, we still agonized over the fact that many of you were doing without this essential service. On previous occasions, I've noted that Blue Ridge is blessed to be serving some of the finest people in the world. Your collective positive response to our performance this time around serves to reinforce that conviction.
Jim Lovinggood
President and CEO