In late September 2024, much of the Carolina community took cover as Hurricane Helene swept through the Southeast. An estimated 250 people died and areas across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee were left with billions of dollars in damage.
As focus on the storm shifted from preparation to recovery, one student from the University of South Carolina was among the outpouring of help to rebuild the community.
Eli Hancock was a sophomore in USC’s Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing when he first started a co-op with Dominion Energy in Blythewood. On the way to class one day, Hancock saw a flyer outside the Career Center satellite location at the Swearingen Engineering Center that advertised student jobs with Dominion, continuing the company’s longstanding relationship with the university.
Hancock stayed in Blythewood for about a year before moving to Dominion Energy’s hub in Lexington in 2024. At both stops, he drew up designs and manage projects to help maintain efficient service and reliable power for Dominion customers in the area while balancing his coursework at USC.
“Pretty much any type of work with the power lines for any new businesses, any type of system improvement stuff. I draw up work orders for alignment, doing calculations for the size of transformers. Anything past substations, I'm dealing with,” Hancock says.
But his usual work days were drastically changed when Hurricane Helene left the community in need. In the storm’s aftermath, Hancock and his team shifted to surveying damage around Lexington, Gilbert and Chapin to accelerate the process of getting residents' power back online — a process he says took nearly seven full days of work beginning the day after the storm.
“We’d have these big circuit maps, and we would go circuit by circuit, ride out the whole circuit, starting from the substation to the end of the line and basically just check every point,” he says.
And while Hancock was primarily recording the damage for linemen to begin repairs, he too was getting his hands dirty by clearing lines of smaller branches with long fiberglass poles called Extendo Sticks and replacing fuses.
Hancock says it took several weeks for all residents’ power to be restored, and even after months, Dominion Energy was still helping to make sure repairs were secure and reliable for all customers. Affected customers were thankful for Hancock and the workers, he says, despite the urgency of the situation.
“I mean, pretty much any time I was out, people would be bringing us food and drinks and stuff like that,” he says. “Everyone was really appreciative. People who are out of power for five or six days, and they get their power back on, they’re very thankful, which is really cool to see.”
Hancock is a Spring 2025 graduate of USC, having earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering on May 10. And after his on-the-job experience following Hurricane Helene, Hancock is full-time with Dominion Energy. Beginning this summer, Hancock will serve as an engineer in electric operations, hoping that his most severe storm is already behind him.