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Nine days after Helene knocked out power to more than 310,000 utility customers in Virginia, electricity has been restored to nearly all of them.
Appalachian Power, the main utility in Southwest Virginia, announced Sunday it had completed power restoration. The website Poweroutage.us showed only scattered outages from other utilities.
Meanwhile, both bridges into Taylors Valley, a portion of Washington County that had been cut off during the storm, have been reopened, according to state Sen. Todd Pillion, R-Washington County. One is a temporary bridge that has been erected, the other is the original bridge that the Virginia Department of Transportation has repaired, he said.
“Thank you to VDOT who worked tirelessly on this project,” Governor Glenn Youngkin said in a statement. “There are points of light each day as we recover.”
Anyone interested in donating to the Taylors Valley Community Relief Fund may do so by mailing a check to PO Box 1044, Glade Spring, VA 24340, according to a post on Pillion’s Facebook page.
Appalachian Power said that at the height of the storm, 282,000 of its customers were without electricity — 175,820 in Virginia, 84,920 in West Virginia and 21,260 in Tennessee.
Workers from 27 states helped Appalachian Power’s crews and contractors restore electric service. Mutual assistance crews traveled from Alabama; Arkansas; Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Georgia; Illinois; Indiana; Iowa; Kansas; Kentucky; Louisiana; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; Michigan; Missouri; Nebraska; New Hampshire; New York; Ohio; Oklahoma; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; Texas; Vermont and Wisconsin.
Appalachian said the hardest-hit areas were around Glade Spring in Washington County, Lebanon in Russell County, Tazewell in Tazewell County as well as Bluefield, West Virginia. Some areas required two-person crews to hand-dig 8-foot-deep holes to place new poles, which, depending on the location, could take between 2-4 hours to complete. In all, crews replaced 1,455 poles, 214 miles of wire and 438 transformers, among hundreds of other critical pieces of electrical infrastructure, the utility said.