Piney Woods Road, Hyde County. Photo courtesy of Jim Chrisman Photo.

It happened again. Forgive me for opening with such a simple observation, but consider the following timeline:

Friday, September 14, 2018:

Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 Hurricane in Wrightsville Beach, NC, in the early morning. On the subsequent Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday morning, the storm crept through the region. While the hurricane weakened to a strong tropical storm, it caused widespread flooding and outages across five of the six counties we serve, resulting in an agonizing ten (10) days to energize all facilities not otherwise deemed unsafe by Building Inspectors.

Thursday, October 11, 2018:

Hurricane Michael weakened quickly to a tropical storm after devastating Mexico Beach, Florida. As the storm traveled west to east across North Carolina, Tideland waited for the opportunity to do work on a late Thursday night. At approximately 12:30 am Friday morning crews began visiting worksites to repair multiple broken poles and individual outages across the service area. The co-op worked through the night and into the next day to finally restore power to all facilities Friday evening.

Buckland Road, Merritt Circuit, Photo courtesy of Wayne Brackin.

Friday, September 6, 2019:

Hurricane Dorian made landfall as a Category 1 Hurricane in Cape Hatteras, NC in the early morning. Between 6:00 am and 9:00 am Friday reports began to make their way from Ocracoke of unprecedented storm surge depths inside hundreds of homes and businesses. Winds finally began to ease Saturday at mid-day in our northern counties. With no power to several of our substations, crews worked just over half of a planned 16-hour day in order to start 5:00 am Saturday morning restoring power in all six (6) Tideland EMC counties. Like Hurricane Florence, the loss to so many of our members due to flooding allowed us only to measure full restoration by the number of structures not otherwise deemed unsafe by Building Inspectors. This resulted in full restoration on Tuesday night after 4.5 full days of work utilizing the largest number of linemen and tree crews in the field in at least 15 years.

The threat and consequences of three Hurricane impacts within 51 weeks is a reminder of the vulnerability of our coastal region, as beautiful as it is and as much as we all love living here. While the emotional cost to families, individuals, and business due to the recent flooding is difficult to quantify, we can accurately estimate the cost to our membership for our response to three severe impacts in less than one year. Clear numbers exist for Hurricane Florence and Tropical Storm Michael with a cost of $2.2 million and $140,000, respectively. Our estimate for Hurricane Dorian is $2.1 million as of the time of this writing (12 hours after having fully energized what we could).

Distribution damage in Ocracoke, Photo courtesy of Lonnie Coleman.

Perspective helps one appreciate the impact of this unplanned “storm response spending.”

A good measure of this financial impact is “storm response spending” as a percent of total electric sales revenue in any given calendar year. Together, we suffered “storm response spending” of 4.97% of total electric sales revenue in 2018 and we will suffer the spending of 4.67% of total electric sales revenue in 2019.

Luckily, in 2018 we were able to catch our breath after this punch to the gut due to quick emergency relief action on the part of the State of North Carolina and Federal Government via a Presidential Disaster Declaration. The State is hard at work conducting preliminary damage assessments from the impact of Hurricane Dorian at the time of this writing.

Together, we are all very hopeful that a Presidential Disaster Declaration will save us again and bring relief not only to our membership of nearly 23,000 separate electric services, but also to the individuals, families, and businesses that have suffered so much loss as of September 10, 2019, with hurricane season still upon us.