Thousands of electric cooperative lineworkers are beginning a fourth day of repairs following Hurricane Helene, as co-ops throughout the Southeast tempered positive reports of power restoration with somber expectations.

“This is an unprecedented situation,” said Josh Deaver, chief operating officer at Haywood EMC in Waynesville, North Carolina, where about 20,000 members were still without power as of early Sunday. “The flooding has made roads impassable, and it’s going to take us time and many logistical hurdles to overcome before we can evaluate the outages across the system and begin to make repairs.”

Mutual aid crews faced a Herculean task at other co-ops in North and South Carolina.

“While we’ve seen outage numbers tick down, we do want to urge co-op members to be prepared for prolonged outages, especially in the hardest hit areas where outages could remain for the next seven days,” said Lee Ragsdale, senior vice president of energy delivery at North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives.

As of Sunday morning, much of the repair work was shifting north from Florida, where the number of outages had dipped to less than 87,000. Georgia co-ops had about 261,000 outages, with 235,000 in South Carolina and 150,700 in North Carolina.