(Reuters) – More than 3.5 million homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and other U.S. southeastern and midwestern states were without power on Friday after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a major hurricane late on Thursday, according to data from PowerOutage. us.
As the storm has passed through Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, utilities in those states have begun restoring power. In total, Helene disabled services to more than 5.2 million customers.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted that the remnants of Helene, now a tropical depression, would remain over Tennessee and Kentucky this weekend.
Duke Energy (NYSE:) in North Carolina currently has the most outages, with approximately 605,671 of the state’s approximately 4.3 million customers without service, according to PowerOutage.us.
Duke Energy said in a statement that it has begun energy restoration efforts in the Carolinas.
“Several areas of the state were severely devastated by this storm, so it is safe to say that power restoration will be a multi-day event,” Todd Fountain, storm director for Duke Energy Florida, said in a statement.
Helene on Friday forced major U.S. electric utilities to close or slow power plant operations Southern Co (NYSE:) will take one of its nuclear reactors offline in Georgia and Duke Energy will shut down production at two coal-fired generating units.
These are the most important outages per state:
State disturbances
South Carolina 1,171,885
Georgia 883,600
North Carolina 831,208
Florida 633,884
Virginia 231,920
Kentucky 192,499
Tennessee 82,442
West Virginia 88,379
Ohio323,661
Totally out
3,572,000
