Metro Atlanta outages nearly gone, but Augusta problems persist
As of late Friday afternoon, there were still 129,917 customers in Georgia without power, with Augusta representing the lion’s share of outages.
Metro Atlanta’s power woes had been reduced to a few pockets of problems. Even Clayton County, which had more than its share of troubles earlier in the week, was almost completely restored.
In contrast, Augusta and the area around it accounted for more than 60,000 of the 76,817 customers that Georgia Power said were still without electricity.
Another large concentration of outages was in Milledgeville, where more than 2,700 customers were without power.
Georgia Power has predicted that it would restore power to nearly all of the remaining areas by midnight on Saturday.
Georgia Power provides service to about half the customers in the state. The other half is serviced by the 40-plus utilities that are part of the Georgia Electric Membership Corp. And that network reported 53,100 customers still without power as of Friday at 5 p.m.
Georgia EMC said its network had restored power to 235,640 customers. Georgia Power has restored power to roughly 500,000 customers.
At some point this week, about 865,000 customers in Georgia have lost power, including those still waiting to get it back.
When utilities say “customer,” they mean an account or a meter. But 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.
And statewide there is an average of slightly more than two people per electric customer. That would mean that the total affected would be nearly 1.8 million.
