More than 1.5 million energy customers remain in the dark as the southeastern United States starts to pick up the pieces following Hurricane Helene.

Nearly 150 Alliant Energy employees from Wisconsin and Iowa head to Virginia to help.

Alliant energy spokesperson Melissa McCarville says they left early Sunday and are expected to be gone for one to two weeks.

Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of the Florida Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm late in the evening of September 26th. Although slowly weakening as it moved north across the Deep South and then northwestward across the southern Appalachians, Helene caused significant impacts across a large portion of the Southeast U.S., especially around the southern Appalachians.