By Dylan Henson | WNCW
September 22, 2026
Two years after Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina, Duke Energy says the storm forced the largest restoration effort in the company's history — and left behind a grid that is measurably different than the one that existed before the storm hit.
Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesperson who has worked hurricane response for nearly 20 years, says nothing in his career compared to it. The utility, which serves more than 80 counties in North Carolina along with the upstate of South Carolina, lost power to 2.7 million customers during the storm. Crews had to repair roughly 60,000 individual locations and rebuild some of the more than 350 substations that were damaged from scratch.
"It was really much more of a storm than anyone could have imagined," Brooks said. "It brought really destructive winds, but also incredibly powerful flooding — and that flooding brought down bridges, infrastructure, roads."
AN ELECTRIC ARMY, BUILT ON MUTUAL AID
To respond, Duke brought in what Brooks calls an electric army: more than 23,000 field personnel from 20 states and as far away as Canada, working out of 35 operations centers and staging sites. Crews used 14,000 utility poles, 11,000 transformers, 31,000 cross arms and 9 million feet of electric line — enough wire, Brooks said, to stretch from Charlotte to Denver.
That scale of mutual aid is itself a relatively recent capability, Brooks said. He traced it back to lessons learned from Hurricane Hugo, which hit western North Carolina decades ago and predated the industry-wide mutual aid agreements that let utilities call on each other's crews and contract companies during a disaster.
"That didn't exist back in the days of Hurricane Hugo," Brooks said. "But today, the ability to get 23,000 line workers within just a couple of days into the area, on the ground, working, is a testament to the changes that we've made in how we respond to storms."
Some of that help came from far outside the region. Brooks recalled turning a corner in the Woodfin area and finding a crew of line workers shouting instructions back and forth in French — retired linemen from Quebec who now travel from storm to storm as contract workers. In terrain where roads and bridges had simply vanished, some crews reached customers no vehicle could reach at all, including two line workers who hiked up a mountainside on foot to restore power to the VA hospital.
"The changes in terrain, and down trees, and just flooding and washing away of territory really made this probably one of, if not the most challenging storm responses I've ever recalled in my 20 years with the company," Brooks said.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT ON THE GRID NOW
Most customers were back on within days, and nearly everyone who could safely receive power again was restored within a couple of weeks. But Brooks says the more lasting change is what Duke has built into the grid since — starting with a substation near Biltmore Village that survived largely intact because of an earlier upgrade: steel transmission poles that had replaced wooden ones two years before the storm.
Since 2020, Duke says it has upgraded more than 120,000 distribution poles across North and South Carolina, converted 12,000 wood transmission poles to steel, and trimmed more than 50,000 miles of line to reduce outages. The damaged Biltmore Village substation itself has been rebuilt on higher ground, out of the floodplain.
Duke has also expanded what it calls self-healing technology — software that detects an outage and automatically reroutes power around it, similar to a GPS rerouting around a traffic accident. More than 80 percent of Duke's western North Carolina customers — nearly 500,000 people — now benefit from it, and the company says its near real-time visibility into the grid also helps crews find and fix problems faster. Company-wide, Duke says the technology has already prevented 1.4 million outages and saved more than 3.3 million hours of outage time so far this year alone, both already ahead of last year's totals. New tools like drones, which weren't part of Duke's damage-assessment process a few years ago, are now a routine part of it.
Asked why Duke doesn't simply bury more lines underground, given the damage from downed trees, Brooks said it isn't a cure-all. Underground lines reduce tree-related outages, he said, but they create other problems — flooding can make an underground line very difficult to access for repairs, and an underground outage typically takes longer to fix than an overhead one.
"Our philosophy is the right improvement, in the right place," Brooks said, noting that about a third of Duke's lines are already underground, mostly in newer developments where the cost difference is absorbed by developers. In rocky mountain terrain, he said, burying lines is often far more expensive.
THE PRICE OF A STRONGER GRID
All of that costs money. Duke customers already pay into storm-response reserves built into their rates, but Brooks said Helene's damage — 14,000 poles, 11,000 transformers, 9 million feet of line, 23,000 responders — exceeded what the company had set aside. To recover those costs, Brooks
said Duke worked with state regulators on what he called "a bond model,"
spreading the expense over a longer period rather than passing it on to
customers all at once.
"That resulted in a much smaller increase for customers," Brooks said,
adding that grid-hardening investments the company was already making
before Helene — not storm recovery alone — are the primary driver behind
recent rate requests.
Beyond its own system, Duke says it has put more than $1.5 million into emergency preparedness grants across the region since the storm, funding things like shelters, emergency operations centers, first responder training, and equipment including drones. Brooks also pointed customers toward existing programs meant to soften rising bills: free home energy audits, mid-cycle usage alerts, a budget billing program that spreads annual costs into equal monthly payments, thermostat rebate programs, and the company's Share the Light fund, which helps cover bills for customers in a financial crisis.
"Give us as much time as we can," Brooks said. "We want to be able to help you."
WHAT'S NEXT
Brooks said the work isn't just about surviving the last storm — it's about building what he calls an "all-hazards grid," designed for snow, heat, high electricity demand and high wind alike.
"We may not be able to prevent the outage from happening in every case," Brooks said, "but we're getting better and better at restoring it faster."
Two years later, he said, Duke's own employees weren't spared by the
storm either — some dealt with damage or loss in their own families while
responding to everyone else's.
"There are things in our lives we experience that never fully leave, and
I think Helene is one of those," Brooks said. "For us, it was a privilege
to be able to serve the people of western North Carolina and upstate South
Carolina at a time that was really difficult."
Part three of Higher Ground turns to the long, uneven work of getting
families back into homes — and the money still trying to catch up to the
need.
