Over 1.7m US customers still without power from Hurricane Helene

UNITED STATES (Reuters): Over 1.7 million homes and businesses were still without power in the United States (US) Southeast and Midwest on Monday after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a major hurricane on September 26, according to data from Power Outage US.

Those outages were down from around 2 million on Monday afternoon as utilities continued to restore power. In total, the storm knocked out service to around 5.5 million customers.

Helen’s winds, rain and storm surge killed over 100 people, according to a Reuters tally of state and local officials.

The utility with the most outages was US energy company Duke Energy in the Carolinas with about 395,000 customers still out in South Carolina and 266,000 out in North Carolina, according to Power Outage US.

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Duke said on Monday it had restored power to around 1.35 million customers in the Carolinas and expected to restore the majority of remaining outages by Friday night.