South Carolina’s Santee Cooper on Sept. 27 said that Hurricane Helene created a significant event on the Santee Cooper electric system.
“Damage assessment and restoration are ongoing and expected to last several days,” the state-owned utility said, noting that as of 6 a.m. on Sept. 27, Santee Cooper went to Operating Condition (OpCon) 1 alert status.
OpCon 1 alert status means a significant threat to Santee Cooper’s electric system is imminent or has occurred and effects are expected to be widespread.
“Hurricane Helene caused significant damage to our transmission system in the western part of the state, which primarily provides electricity to the state’s electric cooperatives as well as one industrial and one municipal customer,” said Vicky Budreau, Chief Customer Officer. “Our crews are responding to outages as quickly as we safely can, and we’re working alongside our partners at the electric co-ops to restore the transmission service to their substations.”
As of 11 a.m. Sept. 27, Santee Cooper’s transmission system experienced a total of 48 transmission power lines locked out and 116 delivery points impacted because of the storm.
“We are patrolling the system with helicopters and ground crews to complete our damage assessment. Santee Cooper anticipates all delivery points will be energized by Monday night,” it said.
In its retail service territory, approximately 6,700 residential and commercial customers lost power. (Approximately 4,200 customers were without power at the peak.) A majority of the damage was due to high winds, downed trees, and tree limbs on power lines.
Meanwhile, increased rainfall in the Santee Cooper watershed because of Hurricane Helene and upstream lake operations resulted in increased inflows into the Santee Cooper lake system.
Santee Cooper began spilling operations at a rate of 20,000 cubic feet per second (8,976,650 gallons per minute) to keep lake levels below the FERC operating license maximum elevation.
Santee Cooper’s System Operations will continue to monitor rainfall projections and inflows into the Santee Cooper lake system and provide updates as conditions change.
