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There was a period late last week when Georgia Power line crew chief Kenneth Lattimore actually thought he would be in Florida again this week, helping get post-Frances lights back on.

But Tropical Depression Frances walloped Georgia harder than anyone expected.

BITA HONARVAR/AJC (ENLARGE)
A Georgia Power crew works to repair a power line Tuesday in Decatur. If Frances had skipped Georgia, teams like these might have been diverted to Florida. But the storm drove north and gave them plenty of work at home.
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By Tuesday afternoon, Lattimore was in a dripping orange rain slicker in a truck bucket high above Decatur's Candler Street, replacing insulators and power line arms downed by one cut-in-half tree and a few of its branch-shorn friends down the block.

"I don't know if they'll still send us or not," said Lattimore. "We've got to get things mopped up here yet."

Lattimore was one of about 1,000 linemen, and an additional 3,000 supporting crew members and support staff, mobilized statewide over the weekend to deal with Frances' damage.

Hundreds more workers were expected by this morning, sent by Georgia Power's sister companies and their contractors. Other utility companies are standing by with additional help if needed, including two — Duke Power and Dominion — that received the same favor from Georgia Power earlier this year.

At the company's downtown Atlanta headquarters, in a monitor-lined storm center, cookies, cold cuts and half-emptied liters of soft drinks marked the remains of a long holiday weekend.

Lumbering Frances had picked up unexpected speed Sunday as it began moving into Georgia. Winds and downed trees took out high-voltage transmission lines in South and Middle Georgia, and distribution lines across the state.

Then the storm reached Atlanta, and parked.

Georgia Power had about 400,000 customers without power statewide by the start of business Tuesday. By 10 p.m., that number had dropped to 180,000, with 80,000 of them in metropolitan Atlanta. An additional 82,000 customers of other utility providers in the state had been without power during the day.

"It was worse than we projected," said Warren Conoly, general manager of distribution operations for Georgia Power. "Higher winds. More rain."

The company says it could be days before all the power is back on.

The center of Georgia Power's storm recovery operations is the aptly named storm center. It's a hive of people, big-screen monitors, computers and telephones — supplemented by an anachronistic index card display of available work crews — designed to coordinate emergency response.

The center was born in the 1970s, after the company's then locally fragmented approach to storm trouble met its match in a crippling ice storm.

Under Georgia Public Service Commission rules, Georgia Power budgets about $9 million per year into a reserve account dedicated to deal with storm damage.

The pot is nearly empty now, said company communications director Tal Wright, although it will begin building up again this month.

Help from other utility companies comes at Georgia Power's expense, and other utilities foot the bill when Georgia Power helps them.

On Tuesday, Georgia Power's new chief executive officer, Michael Garrett, was in the storm center, watching and helping the center's staff line up help from Alabama Power, also a Southern Co. subsidiary.

His request to the Alabama company, relayed over a speakerphone: "As many as you can, as quickly as you can."

"All of these people have a job," Garrett said. "They train for this when nothing is going on, which is the best time. Afterwards, we'll do a postmortem, see if we could do things better. We make sure we do it as good as we can."

A floor-to-ceiling computer monitor at the front of the room tallied the damage.

At 2:30 p.m., the monitor showed 2,303 "events" — downed lines — in Atlanta, with 198,000 people out of power because of those events, and 25,000 people calling about it.

Georgia Power dispatches line crews first to crucial sites, like hospitals, and then to sites where a fix can do the broadest good fast.

In Decatur, the Candler Street trees had blacked out blocks. One tree had lost its top, damaging two consecutive sections of the neighborhood's power line system. Neighbors woke in the dark with the treetop lying in the street.

As Lattimore and crew members Keith Fowler, Jimmy McGee and Hank Loyal worked overhead, neighbors came out in the rain to watch, cheer them on, offer advice and recount the night, including one loudly excited dachshund.

Neighbor Joe Patterson said he lost his lights after the tree across the street lost its top with a "loud bang, a very loud bang. I've lived in Decatur for many years. I've seen a lot of trees lose branches. I've never seen one with its top tore off."

By 4 p.m., Lattimore and crew were predicting another 45 minutes before the lights would come back on.

Lattimore, who spent 10 days restoring power in Florida last month, said he didn't know how long he and his crew would remain on the job in Atlanta. But when they're done, he said, they still may find themselves in Florida.

"There's still a possibility that they'd send us down there," he said, referring to Hurricane Ivan in the Caribbean. "We've got another one brewing out there."