Thousands of metro Atlanta residents will remain without power into Wednesday as a result of the sudden and violent storm that ripped across Georgia early Tuesday.
The powerful winds knocked down trees and killed at least six people in Georgia. The tumbling timber also tore down power lines.
Crews were gradually restoring power Tuesday, with thousands on the north and west sides expected to get their lights back on by midnight. But it will take as much as a day longer to restore power to customers to the east and south of Atlanta, Georgia Power spokesman Jim Barber told the AJC Tuesday evening. That's where most of the outages occurred.
"The bulk of them are on the east side," Barber said.
About 21,000 customers in an arc from Tucker south to Decatur and Jonesboro were without power Tuesday evening, and Georgia Power wasn't expecting to get them all back on the grid until midnight Wednesday, Barber said.
All told, more than half the customers that Georgia Power reported without electricity Tuesday morning remained off line by evening. Of the 118,000 outages statewide reported as of 11:30 a.m., 68,000 remained in the dark as of 8 p.m. Of the 50,000 lacking power in metro Atlanta around noon, 28,000 still lacked service in the evening.
Another provider, the Georgia Electric Membership Corporation, said Tuesday night that it had about 64,000 customers statewide without power, with 13,000 of them in metro Atlanta.
That was down from 120,000 Tuesday morning. Crews were working around the clock to restore service and were planning to work overnight, hoping to get most customers back on line by late Tuesday. Some outages were expected to persist into Wednesday morning, though, said the membership corporation, which represents 42 providers across Georgia.
That meant no lights and no heat for thousands as night fell Tuesday, with temperatures threatening to plunge to near freezing by morning.
The daytime outages wreaked havoc, darkening traffic lights and snarling the morning and evening commutes. DeKalb Recorders Court lost power and had to cancel its 5 p.m. arraignment calendar. Defendants are to be notified by mail of the new date and time to appear.
Spokeswoman Konswello Monroe said Georgia Power had restored power to 300,000 customers since the storm began.
Crews are "working as quickly and as safely as possible to try to get everybody back on," she said. "We have everybody working who's available to work."
In some cases, she added, just getting to the outages is difficult because roads are blocked.
Georgia Power asked neighboring utilities in Alabama and Mississippi for extra crews, "but most of them are experiencing the same conditions so we have not been able to secure any additional resources," Monroe said.
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