Georgia Power said it expected to restore service by late Saturday to 1,000 metro Atlanta residences still without power after Thursday’s storms.
Crews have worked nonstop since the storms, which included two tornadoes, put about 250,000 people in the dark, utility spokesman Mark Williams said Saturday.
Most of the homes still without power were in the north metro area, especially around Sandy Springs and Johnson Ferry Road, Williams said.
The severe weather brought winds of up to 110 mph to Cherokee, Cobb and Fulton counties, tearing down power lines, uprooting trees and damaging buildings in their wake, the National Weather Service said.
“There are still a lot of trees down which has slowed the work,” Williams said Saturday. “We’ve had more than 1,000 people out working and we’ve been working through the night.”
Meanwhile, the Georgia Department of Transportation rescheduled work planned this weekend on I-75/I-85 northbound in Atlanta. The work would have closed up to three lanes and caused heavy congestion.
GDOT also canceled the northbound bridge joint replacements work that was planned for Sunday because of expected Father’s Day and Braves game traffic. Instead, it performed bridge joint work southbound overnight Friday.
“With it being Father’s Day weekend and with the Braves in town, we felt it would be best to push the northbound work back,” GDOT district construction engineer Shun Pringle said. “We obviously can’t cancel work every time there is an event in town. We wouldn’t get any work done. But with the combination of things going on this weekend, this is the right decision.”
GDOT also canceled weekend work to install overhead signs on I-75/I-85 northbound as well. That work will resume at 9 p.m. Sunday with a single northbound left lane closed from I-20 to North Avenue.
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