By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
More than 230 deaths have been attributed to Hurricane Helene which made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26. The storm dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of rain across six states in less than a week, including nearly 31 inches in one North Carolina town. Even a week after the storm, still more than a million people were without power in the Carolinas and Georgia. Alli Conine, director of member services and corporate communication for Wheatland Electric, said a dozen Wheatland linemen from Kansas headed to South Carolina last Thursday to assist with restoration efforts.
"They had more than 100,000 members without power," Conine said. "Ninety-two percent of their system was down. It's a part of our seven cooperative principles: cooperation amongst cooperatives. We've sent crews for mutual aid before and we've also had assistance from crews in the past as well when we've had major storms."
Wheatland linemen can express interest in traveling out of state when mutual aid is needed, but a little strategy is involved in selecting which linemen will go.
"Obviously, we can't take an entire crew from one location so we just split it up," said Conine. "We sent crew members from Syracuse, Tribune, Leoti, Garden City, Great Bend, and Caldwell."
In all, Kansas electric cooperatives sent 16 crews east following the hurricane. On Sunday, Aiken Electric Cooperative in South Carolina, which handles 5,700 miles of power lines, reported that 40,000 members had power restored. Because the cooperative serves a rural area, each mile of line restored impacts an average of seven customers.