AUGUSTA — Wednesday’s ice storm has turned Georgia’s so-called Garden City into a slushy, slippery mess, causing widespread power outages and toppling trees into roadways.
Eastern Georgia was taking the worst beating in the state, with freezing rain expected to continue through Thursday morning.
A half-inch of ice covered the city at midday Wednesday, the National Weather Service reported. Trees glistened with icicles and white and gray slush covered the roads, with cars sporadically abandoned after careening into ditches.
For the most part, residents heeded warnings to stay inside, mitigating the damage in a city more accustomed to sultry summers than crippling winter weather. Augusta’s emergency management center made robocalls to tens of thousands of residents urging them to stay put, and suburban Columbia County got word out through emails, Facebook and local news media.
Some ventured out anyway. Jim and Alice Faxon, retirees who live in Martinez in Columbia County, heard a bang in the distance around 7 a.m. and lost power. An hour later, they were drinking coffee at a nearby Waffle House, which had Alice’s daughter mortified.
“I was born and raised in Michigan,” Jim Faxon, 76, said with a shrug, “but yeah, this is a winter storm, but they come and go, and it’s going to be 45 tomorrow.”
Their house still holding heat, the Faxons planned to wade out the rest of the day at home. They have a gas fireplace, but the switch to turn it on takes electricity. They said they would eat cheese and crackers for lunch and cook dinner on their gas grill.
Across the region, emergency officials fielded multiple reports of trees falling on power lines, trees across roadways, power lines across roadways and power poles snapping. At one point, storm drains froze up along Bobby Jones Expressway, causing water to back up into the road and freeze.
Walton Rehabilitation Hospital, in downtown Augusta, lost power in the morning, and the city’s emergency management office arranged extra gasoline to run its backup generators.
As of noon, about 17,800 homes and buildings in Augusta and 6,200 in Columbia County had lost power, a Georgia Power spokesman said.
Another 2,550 have lost power in rural Burke County, to the south, along with 800 in McDuffie County, to the west.
Throughout the east Georgia region, the grand total was 36,000 outages. Georgia Power set up a massive staging area for utility trucks — many of them supplied by out-of-state contractors — in the parking lot of the defunct Regency Mall south of downtown. Power has been restored to about 14,000 customers in the area so far, the spokesman said.
For many people cooped up in dark houses, the biggest news of the day was that The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore, known for braving hazardous weather on camera, was reporting from Augusta. It was a measure of just how bad Mother Nature was punishing Augusta.
“My daughter called,” Alice Faxon, 71, said, “and said, ‘You must be about to get hit with something really bad.’”
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