Oct 1 (Reuters) - Restoring power to parts of the rural

United States could take several weeks after Hurricane Helene's

high winds and flooding decimated stretches of the southeast

electrical grid, utility officials said on Tuesday.

Helene, which barreled north after making landfall in

Florida on Sept. 26, ripped away thousands of miles of

transmission lines and power poles in hard-to-reach parts of the

country, members of the National Rural Electric Cooperative

Association said on a call.

"I've been in this business for 38 years, and I've never

seen anything like it," said Dennis Chastain, CEO of Georgia

Electric Membership Corp. "It is devastation that's hard to

describe."

Local electric cooperatives, which are owned by their

customers, cover more than half of the country's landscape.

Georgia's transmission provider for the state's electric

co-ops had 166 distribution stations out during the peak of the

storm. In South Carolina, Helene wiped out at least 2,000 power

poles, said Michael Couick, who heads that state's association

of co-ops.

In an area around the Blue Ridge Mountains, energy workers

are attempting to rebuild 7,300 miles (11,748 km) of

transmission line, which is a length that could almost cover the

diameter of earth, Couick said.

The rebuilding will require scaling mountainsides and

drilling into solid rock, but only after accessing roads that

may have been washed away by the storm's flooding, Couick said.

"When we're thinking about this rebuild, we're thinking

about some of the most remote territory in this country," he

added.

The southeast region's biggest investor-owned electric

utilities, including Duke Energy ( DUK ) and Southern Co ( SO ),

which shut coal and nuclear power plant units due to the storm,

also had hefty rebuilding tasks in front of them.

Duke, the largest utility covering North Carolina and South

Carolina, still has nearly 650,000 customers without power as of

Tuesday after restoring electricity to 1.6 million homes and

business in those states.

Investor-owned electric utilities have the largest share of

customers in the country, with cooperatives and municipal

utilities taking up the rest.

"While it will be a long road to recovery, requiring

significant rebuilding in many places, we will persist until the

job is done," said Scott Corwin, CEO of the American Public

Power Association.

More than 1.4 million electric customers across 10 states

were still without power five days after Helene touched down in

Florida.