Most of Augusta left without power

AUGUSTA — About three-quarters of Augusta's residents faced a cold, dark night without electricity Thursday, after a wicked winter storm saved its heaviest wrath for the state's "Garden City."

For many Augustans, it would be their second cold night in a row.

But while thousands of people wondered where they would find heat and food, government officials praised their own response to the storm. They opened shelters at parks and a National Guard armory, but many families couldn’t get the message without television or Internet.

“That means there’s only so much we can do,” said Jim Butterworth, the adjutant general of the Georgia National Guard, which had more than 150 service members and 41 vehicles aiding in the cleanup Thursday. “Creative people are charging their phones in their cars.”

The epic storm buried Georgia’s second-largest city — famous for its lush golf links and thick hot summers — in an inch of ice. Power lines went down all over the city, ripped apart as trees and branches bent and snapped.

At one point Thursday, an estimated 124,000 homes and buildings were without electricity — the highest number of outages in the state. The city was at a virtual standstill, roads covered in slush and muck and blocked by debris.

Nearly 100,000 in Augusta and suburban Columbia County still went without power as night fell, including some nursing home residents. Officials said it may be Sunday or later before power is restored to some homes.

For Telvin and April Sturgis, Waffle House workers who live in the Harrisburg neighborhood near downtown Augusta, their ordeal started at midnight when they heard a rustle of branches and a loud boom in the distance. Their power, which had been flickering all day Wednesday, went dark.

Within a few hours, the temperature in their tin-roofed house had plummeted, and their 3- and 2-year-old sons complained of the cold. April’s grandmother braved the roads to take the children back to her apartment, which didn’t have power either, but could hold heat better.

The couple then walked several blocks to Telvin’s grandmother’s house, which still had juice, to warm up.

“We don’t know what to do,” April, 19, said, smoking a cigar on the front porch. “The only truck I’ve seen was the mail man.”

“It seems like don’t nobody care,” Telvin, 22, said. “It seems like nobody’s interested in coming over here and making sure everybody’s staying warm.”

State and local officials said they were doing everything they could.

Gov. Nathan Deal urged people to hang tight, saying that strike teams of first responders with chain saws would help remove debris and clear roadways.

He flew to Augusta by helicopter Thursday afternoon to survey the damage with Mayor Deke Copenhaver and Columbia County Commission Chairman Ron Cross. En route to the city, he said he could clearly see where the bad ice started. He described trees holding ice and utility trucks dispatched throughout the area.

“I want them to know that we haven’t forgotten about them,” the governor said of Augustans and Columbia County residents. “We knew they were going to be part of this storm.”

Deal said he was in talks with Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hoping to get a federal disaster declaration which would give the Augusta area millions of dollars to help it recover.

Augusta’s debacle wasn’t as bad as Atlanta’s gridlock-inducing “Snowjam 2014” of two weeks ago, Deal said, mainly because the public cooperated with instructions to stay inside.

“It’s really miraculous that we have not had fatalities on our roadways,” Deal said.

Copenhaver, the Augusta mayor, said he was “pleasantly surprised by what we saw from the air,” with 95 percent of major roads already cleared. He praised the city’s emergency responders for a “great job and a great response.”

But even with the ice slowly melting, the damage it wrought to the power grid is so severe it will take days to repair. No part of town was spared.

“It’s the entire county unfortunately,” said Mie Lucas, disaster preparedness coordinator with Augusta-Richmond County’s Emergency Management Agency.

Augusta opened a shelter at a city park Wednesday night, but only three people showed up.

Columbia County officials had to close one storm shelter because its power went out. They opened a new one in a Department of Education building and have a second one standing by.

Power went out at two Richmond County nursing homes. Special Operations Chief Byron Taylor of the Augusta fire department said they were getting help from the city’s medical community.

“They’re doing what 82 percent of all the homes in Richmond County are doing,” Taylor said. “Sheltering in place — having flashlights, extra blankets, having water brought in by jug or bottle.”

In Columbia County, a falling tree struck a child playing in the woods, said Emergency Management Agency Director Pam Tucker. The child was sent to a hospital trauma unit, but Tucker had no information on the child’s age or gender. A sheriff’s deputy was also struck by a falling tree, but the injury required only stitches, Tucker said.

Power problems even brought down phone service for hours at Columbia County’s emergency operations center and 3-1-1 service.

Meanwhile, the city suffered under a layer of glistening ice. The Augusta National’s legendary Magnolia Lane entranceway was littered with fallen magnolia limbs, and James Brown’s bronze statue had a beard of ice.

Most businesses were shuttered, and what few restaurants opened became quickly overwhelmed. Hotels filled with refugees and out-of-state utility workers hired by Georgia Power.

Spokesman John Kraft did not have a total of the number of Georgia Power’s repair employees working in the Augusta area, but said the company began bringing in additional repair crews from out-of-state utilities Thursday. Georgia Power had roughly 5,000 repair crew employees in the state before the storm, about half its own employees and the rest contractors and staff borrowed from other utilities.

Along Gordon Highway, south of downtown Augusta, a Las Vegas company sold gas generators out of a truck trailer. Mark Hill and his family had gone without power all night, and stopped by while out looking for an open restaurant.

Hill couldn’t afford the $1,500 price and moved on. He said Georgia Power should do more to maintain transformers and cut limbs and trees looming over lines.

“They only come out to cut it off if you owe them money,” Hill said. “They don’t ever come out to do anything else if you live in Augusta.”

Lori Davis, who lives in the Harrisburg neighborhood near downtown, was among those left without heat or light for most of Wednesday night. At one point, the power came back on for three hours, then went off again. She and her husband, Roger, were dressed in layers, cooking on a propane grills, and keeping their pistols and shotguns handy, feeling left to their own devices to get by.

On Thursday, they could see their breaths inside their 130-year-old home. Roger listened for news updates on a crank shortwave radio.