More than 1M customers in SC remain without power in wake of Hurricane Helene

South Carolinians continue to feel the effects of Hurricane Helene as more than 1 million customers remained without power Saturday morning.

The storm made landfall in Florida late Thursday night as a category 3 hurricane, and then traveled inland into Georgia and North and South Carolina. Helene was listed as a tropical storm as of 6 a.m. Friday morning, //but the damage she left in her wake classified her as one of the strongest storms on record. The National Weather Service in Columbia clocked winds at 67 mph at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport at 6:12 a.m.

As of 8:30 a.m. Saturday, there were 1,073,960 customers without power across South Carolina, according to PowerOutage.us. The outages were widespread, but the Upstate and the Midlands were the most-impacted areas.

More than 54,000 customers were without power in Richland County as of 8:30 a.m., while Lexington County had nearly 69,000 outages, an improvement since Friday afternoon.

In Newberry County, northwest of Columbia, all but a thousand of the 16,761 customers were still without power Saturday morning, the website reported.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.