'Whole Counties' Left Without Power From Helene

A peek at the PowerOutage.com map reveals that the southeast portion of the United States was bathed in red on Friday morning, indicating millions of customers without electricity in the wake of Hurricane Helene, reports CNN. South Carolina showed the most customers out as of 10:30am ET on Friday, with the map logging more than 1,380,000 outages. Florida came next, with about 1,067,000 outages, then Georgia (1,063,000 or so), North Carolina (656,000), and Virginia (just over 78,000). That's a total of about 4.25 million who were left without power in those five states.

The AP notes that Tennessee is also experiencing power outages (about 55,000, according to the map), while Kentucky and Ohio are also shown to be suffering electricity losses (about 24,000 and 15,000 outages, respectively). USA Today's power outage tracker shows relatively similar numbers. In South Carolina, the hardest-hit state electricity-wise, almost half of all homes and businesses were left powerless on Friday morning, with "whole counties" sans electricity, per the AP. (More Hurricane Helene stories.)