AUGUSTA — Tens of thousands of Augustans will suffer into the weekend without heat or lights, as an overwhelmed Georgia Power scrambles to send more repair crews to a city wrecked by ice.
The resources sent here by the utility clearly weren’t enough, even though meteorologists warned early in the week that a massive winter storm would give east Georgia the worst clobbering in the state.
And it did. In some neighborhoods, power poles remained snapped and downed power lines lay exposed for more than 24 hours, following a night of freezing rain that had transformers exploding across town like bombs in a war zone.
Even as a warm sun melts the last of the ice, Augusta remains a city in pain.
The sick and elderly have been displaced. Nursing homes and shelters lost power. Neighborhoods are in shambles, with at least 200 homes struck by falling trees and debris. And a majority of residents bore a frigid Thursday night without heat, many of them preparing to do it again Friday.
“It’s pretty bad when you can see your breath in the house,” said Daniel Stevens, 13, curled under a blanket near a fireplace, his family’s only source of warmth. “My hands get cold. My ears feel weird.”
The Stevenses, who live in National Hills subdivision not far from the Augusta National Golf Club, lost power Wednesday afternoon. The first night wasn’t so bad with the house still holding heat, but the second night they slept under piles of comforters, bit by cold every time they stuck their noses out for air.
On Friday they burned logs cut from branches that crashed into their front door. They scooped ice from their front yard into plastic baggies to keep their food from spoiling in a cooler.
“You just keep going, just to keep warm,” Teresa Stevens, Daniel’s mother, said.
The vast majority of the state’s remaining outages are in the Augusta area. Nearly 60,000 Georgia Power customers in the city and suburban Columbia County still lacked electricity Friday evening.
“At this point we still feel very confident” that 99 percent will have power by Sunday, said company spokesman Jacob Hawkins.
The 12-county area accounted for about 80,000 of the 82,000 Georgia Power customers statewide that were still in the dark Friday. At that point, the company had returned service to 614,000 of its customers who had lost power during the storm.
With the job mostly done in the other hard-hit part of the state – metro Atlanta – Hawkins said the company had shifted hundreds of repair crews to Augusta, bringing total staffing in the area to 2,500. He said Georgia Power was shifting another 400 to 500 crew members to the area Friday.
Hawkins couldn’t say how many repair crews Georgia Power initially stationed in Augusta before the storm, but he disputed any contention that the company had erred by sending too few.
“We were fully staffed. We had all our crews on alert,” said Hawkins. He said Georgia Power had 5,000 repair employees, contractors and staff borrowed from other utilities before the storm. It distributed those workers across the state based on the latest forecasts for the winter storm.
Gov. Nathan Deal has extended his emergency declaration until Wednesday for the Augusta area and said he has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start inspecting damaged homes, part of his effort to have the federal government declare a disaster, which could bring in millions of dollars in cleanup aid.
In many ways, the storm highlighted the stark divide between the haves and the have-nots in the state’s second-largest city, which is both home to the Masters tournament and the hometown of late soul singer James Brown.
Many with resources poured into the best hotels during the storm and dined on buffet meals, or purchased generators and hired tree removal services. Others shivered at home or huddled in shelters, clamoring for hot meals and complaining of cab drivers and seedy hotels jacking up their rates.
“Even the cheap, sleazy, nasty ones were booked,” said Markita Mathis, 26. “You would think this was the Masters.”
Mathis, a single mother, took her 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son to a Red Cross shelter Thursday night after nearly 24 hours without power.
After a tree fell and ripped through power lines in her southside neighborhood, she called Georgia Power, but the representative wouldn’t take her report because her account is in a relative’s name, Mathis said.
She found a neighbor with a car charger who let her power up her phone, and she saw information about the shelter on her Facebook feed. By the time they boarded a bus to get there, the children had chilly fingers and bad dispositions.
“Augusta, Georgia, wasn’t ready for this,” she said.
Tim Hollobaugh and his wife, Shirley, both sick and disabled, got rides to the shelter in National Guard vehicles. Hollobaugh, who is wheelchair-bound from a deteriorated spine, said they lost power Thursday morning. Both rely on electricity for medical equipment.
He said he got no answer when he called the city’s 311 helpline. When he called 911, Hollobaugh said, the operator told him to call the power company and hung up before he could explain his predicament.
He finally called a county commissioner, who put him in touch with the emergency operations center.
“It’s not that anybody’s being malicious,” he said. “It’s just very poor planning and lack of scope.”
Copenhaver, the Augusta mayor, defended the city’s preparations for what turned out to be “the biggest storm of my lifetime.”
He said he got a call from Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers, who assured him the company was doing everything it could.
“It’s all the resources that they can deploy,” Copenhaver said. “I’m sure of it.”
To help residents left in the cold, the mayor said the city set up shelters and coordinated with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. One of those shelters, in a community center next to the old jail, lost power itself and had to be abandoned.
About 200 residents were at Augusta shelters Friday.
The Rev. Kelly McKnight of Bible Deliverance Temple said he would have let families without heat gather in his church’s fellowship hall, but it had been out of power for more than two days. He said he knew of five families who holed up in a single home because it has gas heat.
“In lower-income areas of town, people just don’t have the individual resources and people have to rely more on government to respond,” said former Augusta Mayor Bob Young.
On Friday, residents still shaken by a night of falling limbs and exploding transformers grew accustomed to the sounds of chainsaws. Scott Richardson had his chainsaw out, helping his neighbors in National Hills clear fallen limbs from their yards.
He had a rough week. His wife, Jennifer, suffers from a debilitating central nervous system disease that has her bedridden, with constant pain in her back and lower legs. The family lost power Wednesday afternoon and the temperature in the house plummeted to 40 degrees.
Richardson had to move her to her parents’ house in North Augusta, across the South Carolina line. She cried and screamed in pain the whole ride there, then after they arrived, her parents’ power went out until Thursday afternoon.
“It’s just been getting worse and worse with her,” he said. “And the problem is the cold. She can’t handle cold weather.”
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