Linemen spent weeks away from home responding to Helene, Milton
Duke Energy supervisor recalls weeks-long response to Helene, Milton
Duke Energy Power Grid Operations Supervisor Seth Caison spent three weeks with his team responding to outages caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton. Linemen were away from their families for weeks, working in extreme circumstances.
GREENSBORO, N.C. - Families of linemen waited for weeks to see them while they responded to back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton as energy crews in western North Carolina saw some of the worst destruction of their careers.
For Seth Caison, a Duke Energy supervisor in Greensboro, working in energy is a family business in more ways than one. His father and younger brother work for Duke and headed north to respond to Helene’s catastrophic flooding that knocked out power to millions.
Seth Caison, right, with his father and younger brother.
However, being a lineman means your immediate family is part of helping restore the power, too.
Back home, while he was away for three weeks, Caison’s wife cared for their two young children while also working.
"My wife is awesome. She held the fort down," Caison said. "The ones at home are the ones that are keeping everything together for us while we're gone."
When a storm hits, Caison said his family and friends see the news and always reach out. One friend cut his grass while he was away, while others continued checking in to see if his family needed anything.
"It takes a community. Family and friends were coming over, bringing super, helping with the kids. So, you know, once something like that happens, it is like everybody kind of pitches again nowadays."
Caison was gone for three weeks, longer than any other storm response of his 12-year career. After getting home, he and his wife went to pick up their boys from preschool, where he got some of the best welcome-home hugs.
"When I left, he was just starting to walk," Caison said of his one-and-half-year-old. "And then I came around the corner to pick him up, and he was running. ‘Oh my gosh, did this happen?’"
‘Picking up the pieces’
Duke Energy teams in Greensboro watched on the news as Helene’s impacts steamrolled across the Carolinas, dropping more than 2 feet of rain in some places. Ultimately, the storm would claim more than 100 lives in North Carolina and create an estimated $53 billion in damages.
Soon after the outages started rising, Duke supervisors were told this was an "all hands on deck" situation and to prepare to head into the mountains.
The Helene Storm Team of the Duke Lineman from Greensboro, North Carolina. (Seth Caison)
Hundreds of linemen, engineers and contractors left the Greensboro region to restore power across western North Carolina. Caison’s team was in the Hickory area, approaching the start of the mountains.