The grills are going by 4 a.m., and the scent of sizzling pork begins wafting through the trailers shortly after.
An hour later, the camp starts clearing out as line workers hop in their trucks and move out to replace broken power poles, repair damaged lines and work to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of South Carolinian homes and businesses still without juice after Tropical Storm Helene.
A few days ago, these basecamps were parking lots. Now they house thousands of utility workers.
A site at Greenville's Haywood Mall, one of several Duke Energy camps across the Upstate, has 80 semi-trailers lined up to serve 2,000 workers.
In Pickens and Oconee counties, Blue Ridge Electric Co-Op has two 400-person sites set up at its campuses, with more workers on their way.
The mobile basecamp at Blue Ridge Electric Co-op in Pickens housed 400 people in a dozen trailers on Oct. 1, 2024.
“We start from scratch, and we're a working inner-city once we're here,” said Daniel Bianco, who manages both Storm Services sites for Blue Ridge. “From eating, sleeping, shower and laundry, everybody has their own needs met right here.”
The kitchen trailers are filled to the brim with top-notch appliances — fryers, grills, commercial mixers — and produce three meals a day. Breakfast starts with bacon, eggs and sausage in Pickens and includes French toast, hash browns, biscuits and gravy — heavy on carbohydrates to fuel up linemen for long days.
Storm Solutions has some staff who travel with them and hires locals to staff its mobile cities that support utility workers during power outages. The menu includes three meals a day and "top-tier" food, site manager Daniel Bianco said.
Boxed lunches are packed for workers when they hit the road. They come back to basecamp after sundown to reload their coolers with ice and drinks for the next day and to enjoy a hearty meal.
The dinner menu is top-tier, Bianco said, because these folks are out working 12-hour days and away from their families for weeks at a time. Blue Ridge workers enjoyed pork chops, breaded chicken and prime rib this week.
“These guys are out all day. I mean, they're working tirelessly, so we gotta feed them good,” he said. “We got two meats, two vegetables, a starch, salads, all kinds of snacks, desserts — peach cobbler, pecan pie.”
He’s going through four pallets of drinks and two pallets of food for 400 workers. That number will grow as additional crews arrive from across the U.S.
Utility workers have come from as far away as Texas and Minnesota, said Duke Energy site coordinator Darryl Duncan. Mutual aid agreements enable them to travel easily across the country, he said, and sometimes from Canada, depending on the location and extent of the outage.
“The mutual assistance piece is really a unique thing for the utility industry, and it's really what keeps everything rolling because you need that army to help you get everybody back up as quickly as possible,” Duncan said.
Other trailers onsite house showers, bathrooms, laundry rooms and air conditioners. Bedding is changed out every three days, Bianco said, and workers can drop off their laundry bags at any point to be washed and dried while they work.
Fueling tanks are onsite at the mini-cities so that trucks are refueled and ready to go the next morning, Duncan said.
There are additional tents for dining and overflow sleeping, the latter set up with cots and air conditioning.
Bunk trailers sleep anywhere from 20 to 36 to a trailer. Each bunk — stacked three beds high in some cases — has a night light, electric outlet and curtains for sleeping.
Storm Solutions provides trailers that house 36 people in tri-level bunks beds, though some options — including those for females — are roomier.
Some are made up, some have personal blankets or pillows, and others have a bag of clean bedding awaiting on top. The air conditioners run on full blast, greeting the workers with a chill the moment they open the trailer doors.
While the bunks don’t get too much personalization, one at the Pickens site had a boot dryer ready to be plugged in rather than a phone charger.
“That’s somebody who has seen a lot of storms,” Bianco laughed.
