Dozens of utility workers from Iowa are now in Ohio, helping restore electricity to thousands of homes and businesses in areas where the remnants of Hurricane Helene caused widespread damage over the weekend.

Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for MidAmerican Energy, says they sent about 70 line workers and support crews to Cincinnati after staging with their big bucket trucks in Des Moines and Davenport on Friday night.

“They got to the Cincinnati area on Saturday night and they got to work. They’ve been working very long days, on the average, about 16-hour days,” Greenwood says. “They’ve made a lot of progress, and these are largely residential areas. It’s the same type of work that they would do here, but obviously the magnitude is much greater right now because of the need.”

There are areas of the south and southeastern U.S. that were much harder hit by the storm’s remnants than Ohio, and Greenwood says the Iowa crews that are now in the Cincinnati metro are expecting to get another assignment very soon.

“Right now in the U.S., there are about a million customers still out in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, so we’re in a bit of a holding pattern,” Greenwood says. “Our crews will continue working in the Cincinnati area throughout the day, but it’s likely that they will get a request to go farther east.”

It’s still unclear where the Iowa crews will be heading next to lend a hand.

“We are in discussions right now with Duke Energy, which serves customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee,” he says, “and really a lot of these areas that they serve were hit by this hurricane, or at least by the remnants of the hurricane.”

At the peak, about 140,000 Cincinnati area customers were without power, and by 9 AM on Monday, only 3,000 or so remained offline, so the Iowa crews should be wrapping up there very soon. While Ohio is a long way from the ocean, the former hurricane still caused severe damage.

“Even though the winds went to under hurricane strength, they were still very, very strong,” Greenwood says. “When you’re talking about sustained winds of 50 to 70 miles per hour, it really hits overhead lines, hits trees. It just does all the damage that we know from first-hand experience when we had the derecho here several years ago.”

Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy serves 820,000 electric customers in Iowa, Illinois and South Dakota, and 797,000 natural gas customers in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and South Dakota.