Rutherford EMC has experienced catastrophic damage to a large portion of our infrastructure due to Hurricane Helene.

Current damage largely exceeds what we experienced with Hurricane Hugo in 1989. REMC crews and all employees are actively responding to these outages and working in coordination with our Statewide Association and co-ops across North Carolina and beyond.

Updates have been posted to our website as often as possible. Due to our all-hands-on-deck restoration efforts, these updates may not be as frequent as some may feel is necessary.

Our efforts directly following the storm were to assess all the damages and determine what parts of the system would need to be rebuilt versus repaired. Several substations and transmission lines were torn apart. That infrastructure had to be rebuilt and repaired before we could begin working on taps and individual services.

As of Sunday, October 6th, many of our substations and transmission lines are rebuilt to a point that crews have been able to focus on repairing taps.

It has taken 87 years for Rutherford EMC to build this electric system from the ground up. Hurricane Helene destroyed much of the system within hours. We understand the frustration that many are feeling right now, and we ask that you remain patient as we have hundreds of men in the field every day, working as hard as they can to restore your service.

Key facts:

• We have 7,700 miles of line on our system and approximately 6,800 miles were damaged during the storm.
• Hundreds of poles were broken during Helene.
• At the height of the storm, more than 68,500 members were without power (over 90% of our system).
• In many areas, the system is being completely rebuilt from scratch as we discover our infrastructure is completely missing.