GREENSBORO, North Carolina – Linemen’s families waited weeks to see them while they responded back-to-back hurricanes Helene And Milton as energy teams in the west North Carolina experienced some of the worst destruction of their career.

For Seth Caison, supervisor of Duke Energy at Greensboroworking in energy is a family business in more ways than one. Her father and younger brother work for Duke and are heading north to respond to Helen’s catastrophic disaster. flood which cut off electricity to millions of people.

Seth Caison, right, with his father and younger brother.

However, being a lineman means your immediate family is also involved in restoring power.

Back home, during his three-week absence, Caison’s wife took care of their two young children while working.

“My wife is awesome. She held down the fort,” Caison said. “The ones at home are the ones who keep everything together for us while we are away. »

When a storm hits, Caison says his family and friends see the news and always contact us. A friend cut his grass while he was away, while others continued to check on his family to see if they needed anything.

“It takes a community. Family and friends would come to our house, bring supers, help with the kids. So, you know, once something like that happens, it’s like everyone pitches in again nowadays.”

Caison was gone for three weeks, longer than any other storm response in his 12-year career. After obtaining Househe and his wife picked up their boys from preschool, where he received some of the best welcome home hugs.

“When I left, he was just starting to walk,” Caison said of her 1.5-year-old. “And then I picked him up on the corner, and he was running. ‘Oh my God, did that happen?'”

“Picking up the pieces”

Duke Energy crews in Greensboro watched the news as Helen’s impacts spread across the Carolinas, dropping more than 2 feet of rain in some places. Eventually, the storm would kill more than 100 people in North Carolina and create an estimate $53 billion in damage.

Shortly after the outages began to mount, Duke supervisors were informed that it was an “all hands on deck” situation and that they needed to prepare to go to the mountains.

Team Helene Storm from the Duke Lineman of Greensboro, North Carolina. (Seth Caison)

Hundreds of linemen, engineers and contractors left the Greensboro area to restore power to western North Carolina. Caison’s team was in the Hickory region, approaching the beginning of the mountains.

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