Last week when weather officials feared Hurricane Dorian could slam into Florida as a category 5 storm, America’s biggest electric line support company dispatched hundreds of its linemen and other specialists to the Sunshine State to be ready if the hurricane began to knock out power.
The storm avoided most of the damage to Florida initially feared this week as the hurricane intensified, stalled and then overwhelmed the Bahamas with rain and wind before moving up along the coast and threatening eastern Georgia and the Carolinas.
“Last week, we sent 225 workers to Oklahoma City after the tornadoes there and they headed straight from there to central and northern Florida where we have about 400 workers altogether on standby,” Jody Shea, CEO of the Service Electric Co. in Chattanooga and a senior vice president for the parent company Quanta Services Co., said Wednesday. “We thought this was going to be the mother of all storms, but now we’re moving some of our crews to North and South Carolina.”
Duke Energy projected Wednesday that approaching Hurricane Dorian could cause more than 700,000 power outages – some possibly lasting several days – in eastern areas of North Carolina and South Carolina, based on the storm’s current forecasted track.
Tracking Hurricane DorianIn response, the Chattanooga-based Service Electric Co., one of the biggest power line construction and restoration companies in America with more than 1,600 employees at seven offices, is joining with other utilities, power coops and municipal electric companies to deploy workers to keep the lights on.