Utility crews across Georgia worked into the evening Wednesday to restore power to tens of thousands of homes, struggling to keep pace with the damage wreaked by an ice storm that blanketed much of the state.
Thursday, freezing rain is expected to give way to snow, but metro Atlanta will still have to deal with downed power lines, trees and utility poles. Many homes will still be without power, possibly for days. “It could easily be several days,” said John Kraft, spokesman for Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility.
The weather could continue to hamper efforts to restore electricity. “We hear there is going to be more snow, and we are concerned about that,” said Ashley Kramer, spokeswoman for GreyStone Power, which provides service to about 107,400 customers in eight metro Atlanta counties.
It appeared that well over 250,000 residences and businesses across the state lost power Wednesday, but precise numbers were hard to come by.
At one point, 11,500 of GreyStone's customers — about 10 percent — were without power.
GreyStone is part of a network of more than 40 Electric Membership Cooperatives, or EMCs, that cover parts of 157 of the state’s 159 counties. The network brought in hundreds of crews from around the Southeast to deal with the storm, said Terri Statham, spokeswoman for Georgia’s EMC network.
“We feel like we have the resources,” she said.
Even so, day will dawn with many people still without electricity, she said. “It’s good to be realistic. If we have to streamline and replace poles – that is a time-intensive process.”
Georgia Power reported that 244,000 of its customers had lost power by late in the afternoon. But its crews also had restored power to 113,000 customers by then, possibly beginning to gain the upper hand.
Early in the day, Georgia Power’s repair crews had been losing the race to stay ahead of the damage being wreaked by the storm. At 6 a.m. Wednesday, only about 3,000 of Georgia Power’s customers had lost power. But by 9 a.m., that had mushroomed to 60,000. By 10 a.m., 88,000 were in the dark.
At Georgia Power’s headquarters near the Atlanta Civic Center, about two dozen Georgia Power employees worked their phones and computers in the utility’s “storm center.” The control center is orchestrating a small army of 5,000 linesmen, contractors and other repair employees borrowed from other utility companies.
Behind the main floor of the storm center, managers in a glassed-in conference room hashed out priorities under a large screen showing the march of the storm’s knock-out combo of snow, sleet and freezing rain.
By 11:05 a.m., 145,906 of Georgia Power’s customers had lost power, mostly in metro Atlanta and Augusta, with about 38,000 in Clayton County alone. The company had been able to restore power to 30,099, leaving 116,052 still in the dark.
Georgia Power spokesman Tony Gonzalez said customers in Clayton County had been hit harder because it was a bit warmer there than on the north side of Atlanta, causing more of the precipitation to fall as rain — rather than snow or sleet — and then freeze on power lines and tree branches.
When the ice storm temporarily slackened in mid-day Wednesday, Georgia Power’s repair crews were able to restore power to customers faster than other customers lost power.
By 11:15 a.m., Georgia Power had restored power to 35,980 customers, and the total without power had slipped slightly to 114,394.
But another wave of bad weather was approaching, and the utility warned that it would likely take several days to get everyone’s electricity reconnected. “We’ll be working 24 hours a day,” said Gonzalez.
The weather apparently threw power companies a curve Wednesday as the freeze zone extended farther south than had been forecast on Tuesday.
Georgia Power said it responded to the shifting storm by sending more than 200 reinforcements south from Atlanta Wednesday afternoon, including 85 repair crew borrowed from Alabama Power.
The National Weather Service warned Wednesday that travel would be “impossible” in the worst-hit areas along I-20 and toward Augusta, and that extended power outages as long as a week were likely.
Still, utilities made progress during the day.
About 3,000 customers of Walton EMC, an electrical cooperative east of Atlanta, were without power Wednesday morning, but by the early afternoon it was down to about 100.
Snapping Shoals EMC, which provides service to 95,000 customers in eight counties east of Atlanta, had restored power by afternoon to most of the roughly 3,000 customers who lost it early Wednesday, according to spokeswoman Leigh-Anne Burgess.
Any satisfaction is tempered, she said, with worries about the next wave of precipitation. Moreover, even without more ice or snow, a tree that bears many hours of an icy burden can sometimes weaken and fall.
“But we are hopeful,” Burgess said. “We think we are ready for whatever will happen.”
About the Author
