Some 23,000 Georgia Power customers statewide were still without electricity late Saturday morning as the utility continued efforts to return the region to some semblance of normalcy after an icy week.
Power had been restored to 678,000 of Georgia Power's 701,000 customers who lost power in Wednesday's ice storm, the utility noted in an 5 p.m. Twitter feed Saturday. Most of its remaining customers without power are in Augusta and eastern Georgia, according to the utility.
Georgia Power spokesman Brian Green told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Saturday afternoon that the company expects to have electricity restored to 95 percent of customers by midnight tonight. Green said about 200 customers in metro Atlanta are without power. Crews also are trying to restore electricity to 350 customers in north Georgia, and about 50,000 customers are in the dark in hard-hit south Georgia, he said.
Power was restored Friday in south metro, which was hobbled for most of the week by the ice storm. However, pockets of outages remain there. Some Fayette County residents marked their fourth day without power on Saturday.
“There may be some additional outages (there) we’re able to restore power to those who could receive power,” Green said, noting that in some cases the problem may be individual electrical issues at a customer’s home.
Some 8,000 crews and support staff are still working throughout the state, with many of them being redeployed to Augusta, where 41,000 people are without electricity. That number is down from 80,000 in the last 24 hours.
“We’re experiencing high winds in Augusta (on Saturday) which has caused some additional outages,” Green said.
When utilities say “customer,” they mean an account or a meter. While a customer could be a single person or office building, it could also be a household and a family. That means that the number of people affected by the storm is vastly greater than the number of customers.
Meanwhile, Georgia Electric Membership Corp. reported that as of 11 a.m. Saturday, about 37,500 of its customers remained without power. Georgia EMC, which represents the state’s 41 EMCs, noted that power has been restored to more than 253,700 customers. More than 290 additional crews from unaffected areas in Georgia and from Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Florida and Kentucky are helping EMCs restore power.
Collectively, Georgia’s customer-owned EMCs provide electricity and related services to more than four million people, half of Georgia’s population, across 73 percent of the state’s land area.
Georgia Power has 2.4 million electric customers in Georgia.
About the Author
