Over 3.5 million customers without power in US southeast from Helene

(Reuters) -Over 3.5 million homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and other U.S. Southeastern and Midwestern states were without power on Friday after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a major hurricane late on Thursday, according to data from PowerOutage.us.

Now that the storm has passed through Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, utilities in those states have started to restore power. In total, Helene knocked out service to over 5.2 million customers.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center forecast the remnants of Helene, now a tropical depression, would remain over Tennessee and Kentucky over the weekend.

Duke Energy in North Carolina currently has the most outages with around 605,671 of its roughly 4.3 million customers in the state lacking service, according to PowerOutage.us.

Duke Energy said in a statement that it has started power restoration efforts in the Carolinas.

"Several areas of the state were severely devastated by this storm, so it's safe to say power restoration is going to be a multi-day event," Todd Fountain, Duke Energy Florida storm director, said in a statement.

Helene forced major U.S. electric utilities to shut or slow power plant operations on Friday, with Southern Co taking one of its Georgia nuclear reactors offline and Duke Energy halting output from two coal-fired generating units.

Here are the major outages by state:

State Outages

South Carolina 1,171,885

Georgia 883,600

North Carolina 831,208

Florida 633,884

Virginia 231,920

Kentucky 192,499

Tennessee 82,442

West Virginia 88,379

Ohio 323,661

Total Out

3,572,000

(Reporting by Rahul Paswan, Anmol Choubey in Bengaluru and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Jonathan Oatis, Aurora Ellis and Leslie Adler)