COLUMBIA, S.C. — As the cleanup from Helene continued Friday, the South Carolina Department of Transportation said their teams are trying to clear roads and restore some normalcy to residents after the storm impacted the palmetto state.
Hannah Robinson is the Media Relations Manager for SCDOT. She said trees continue to be the number one issue.
“So crews have been working on clearing trees out of the roadway today. We’ve seen a lot of trees down all over the state, but in the midlands as well. (We're) also monitoring any roadways that have flooding in those low-lying areas. So, they’ve been monitoring those roads, clearing trees out of the roadway, and just providing any kind of assistance they can, Robinson said.
According to Robinson, the department has been working non-stop.
“SCDOT is running on 24-hour operations. We have been since yesterday. So, we have crews doing 12-hour shifts throughout the whole entire state. We have 2,300 personnel that are actively working right now. So we are all systems go at DOT, and we will be likely until the middle of next week with things related to this storm,” Robinson explained.
Robinson said the DOT has moved crews across the state, from the least impacted areas to the most, as they continue their clean-up efforts.
"Some of those crews went over to the western side of the state and aided those crews in Anderson and Greenville. Just because we knew that’s where the brunt of the storm was going to be,” Robinson said.
As power is slowly being restored to areas across the Midlands, traffic lights that had been knocked out by Helene are coming back online.
Friday, the City of Columbia was working throughout their system, reprogramming lights.
Workers said that they were waiting on Dominion Energy to restore power to some intersections before they can get the lights functioning once again.
For more information on road conditions throughout the state, check out the SCDOT road conditions website here.