Take the destructive power of an F5 tornado and combine it with the 80-mile span of a hurricane. That’s how Pearl River Valley Electric Power Association crews who recently returned from Florida describe Hurricane Michael.
The damage was just as bad, if not worse, than Katrina, the veteran linemen say. All 25,000 customers of the electric cooperative they were working for in West Florida were without power.
“We didn’t have a hurricane; we had a flippin’ disaster,” Gavin Daughdrill of PRVEPA said. “These people are in a bind. This is not your typical hurricane.”
They saw one man along a sand road digging a hole in a ditch and dipping water out with a Folgers coffee can. He was boiling it on a campfire for his family. When they drove by again, he had started using a gas can to collect the water.
“We just gave him a whole big case of water off our trucks,” Daughdrill said. “You’ve got to help people.”
The Red Cross gave an update Monday that showed the continued problems nearly two weeks after the storm made landfall on Oct. 10: More than 100,000 people remained without power, in addition to the 1,972 homes destroyed. The death toll stands at 26 in Florida and 10 in Georgia.
Columbia-based PRVEPA sent 15 employees, trucks and equipment to Florida on Oct. 11. Crews initially worked for the Choctawhatchee Electric Cooperative in DeFuniak Springs, Fla. But after finishing up in two days they were asked if they wanted to go further and said yes.
They were sent to the West Florida Electric Cooperative in the middle of the panhandle. The local crews were working off U.S. 231 and were about 50 miles to 60 miles inland near Cottondale. It’s an extremely rural area with little business or farming other than pine trees on the red, sandy soil.
The West Florida cooperative is starting from scratch, they say, for what took 80 years to build. There were still 13,983 meters without power as of Monday.
“When we got over there, oh! We knew we would be there a long time,” Foreman Michael Sims said.
The storm had snapped trees and tumbled huge cotton bales across fields. Fifty-foot poles were pulled out of the ground. There was so much debris covering the old wires that they couldn’t get them out and began running new wire instead. They used four to five 600-pound reels of wire.
It was so bad they worked for two days getting lines back up, but customers still didn’t have power because there wasn’t power to the substations yet.
Residents sat on their porches, not cleaning up, as if they didn’t know what to do. They had not evacuated for a simple reason.
“They didn’t have the resources to evacuate. They didn’t have the money to get out,” Daughdrill said. “These people were in a bind. It shocked me. I had no idea people lived like that in Florida.”
The conditions were also difficult for the linemen, who slept in their trucks for three nights because of poor conditions in the tent city set up for utility workers. They said it was in the middle of a cotton field and a river had come up the day before and put two feet of water in the tents.
“We took baths with our water coolers and bottled water because the showers were so nasty – if we took baths. If not, we used baby wipes,” Daughdrill said.
They later spent a few nights in a church, where members cooked for them. Residents were grateful to get their lights back on.
“The people would be crying, and they’d hug your neck,” Sims said. “They said they were just thankful.”
Crews would go out in the morning to a general area assigned by the West Florida cooperative, which is who is responsible for paying and providing provisions for the out-of-town workers during a crisis like this. It was left mostly up to the individual crews to prioritize what to do. They mainly restored the larger, three-phase lines along highways. It will be much longer to get service to all the homes served by single-phase lines, they said.
Where they worked somewhat depended on what West Florida wanted to get done first. For example, they ran single-phase lines to get power to the home of a woman who worked in the coop’s office, Daughdrill said, and another to a guy’s shop.
The crews worked 16-hour to 18-hour days of non-stop hard work, they said. Overnight they would return to the tent city to get their trucks refueled and receive supplies.
Saturday, PRVEPA sent 15 more workers to relieve the original workers who had been there about 10 days. The current crews will be there for at least a week and they will assess any requests for more workers after that depending on the needs in West Florida, PRVEPA spokesman Kurt Brautigam said.
Despite the hardships, the workers said it wouldn’t be right to not go back and relieve their co-workers who earlier relieved them. They don’t expect power to be back for everyone until at least December, and the effects will be felt for many years.
“All I can say is it’s bad,” Daughdrill said. “There’s going to be a different culture down there, a different community.”
Pictured Above: Joel Pylant, a lineman from the Pearl River Valley Electric Power Association’s Purvis office, follows a downed line during restoration assistance in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in west Florida. Crews described terrible damage from the storm. | Photo courtesy of PRVEPA
