Utility crews chased thousands of power failures across Georgia Wednesday, switching the lights back on here as they blinked off over there.
And when the power died at 7:30 a.m. at their house in Atlanta, Dydra and John Virgil were ready to deploy, too.
“We’ve got Netflix on the iPad. We’re cooking soup on my fondue set,” Dydra said. “And we’re charging the cell phone in the car.” The couple planned to cook dinner on their outdoor gas grill and maybe sleep in the basement by the gas fireplace.
For outdoor entertainment, their street’s steep hill became the center of some impromptu Olympic events.
“We’ve got a downhill and a luge with trash can tops,” Dydra said.
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A ragged and rainy dawn broke on 5,000 Georgia Power workers who were already fanned out across the state — most of them from Georgia, but also some imported from other states.
At 6 a.m., 3,000 Georgia Power customers people were without power. By 9 a.m., 60,000. It went like that all morning, the outages seeming to increase by exponents. By noon, nearly 168,000 Georgia Power customers were out of juice. An hour later, 48,000 had it back. Late Wednesday afternoon, the number of outages had gone back up to 130,000 as the moving target continued moving.
The enemy: the ice falling from the sky, and good old Georgia pine tree (and oaks, and sweetgums …). All over the state, tree limbs cracked like rifle shots in the chill air, taking power lines as they fell, turning out the lights and sometimes the heat for tens of thousands of people.
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Jim and Alice Faxon heard a bang in the distance about 7 a.m., and the house went dark.
The retired couple live in Martinez, outside Augusta, and were pretty much in the bull’s eye of Wednesday’s storm. Unfazed, an hour later they were drinking coffee at Waffle House.
“I was born and raised in Michigan,” Jim Faxon, 76, said with a shrug. “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 wait out the rest of the day at home. They have a gas fireplace, but the switch to turn it on takes electricity. On the lunch menu: cheese and crackers.
Augusta knew it was in for trouble when the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore hit town. Cantore is the network’s worst-weather man – not the worst weatherman, but the worst-weather man – the guy they call out when the world is ending somewhere. So this time it was ending in Augusta.
“My daughter called,” said Alice Faxon, 71, “and said, ‘You must be about to get hit with something really bad.’”
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It’s tough losing power at your house. It’s tougher trying to restore power to thousands of houses, especially in this kind of weather.
First of all, bulky electrical trucks and ice seldom mix. Crews working in Rockdale County Wednesday for Walton EMC plopped heavy transformers into the beds of their trucks to help retain traction. Lineman Ronnie Browning said his truck started to slide during a call before dawn.
“The roads are very messy,” he said.
The freezing cold created an icy crust on tools, power lines, snapped trees, the roads – everything – bogging down repairs.\
“It was pretty bad this morning and the ice was taking its toll,” said John Wanek, a journeyman lineman for Walton EMC. “We have a feeling it’s going to get worse tonight once it gets colder.”
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The ice fell on the mighty as well as the modest.
Two Georgia congressmen reported losing power. U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland said the power died about 9 a.m. at his home in Grantville, in Coweta County. The Republican’s house was packed with his wife, two daughters, one daughter-in-law and seven grandchildren.
They built a fire and Westmoreland had stocked up on food they could make on the grill. A small generator kept the fridge going.
“The grandkids are riding around on my scooter inside here, playing some games,” Westmoreland said Wednesday afternoon. “One just knocked his brains out on the fireplace, but otherwise we’re doing fine.”
U.S. Rep. John Barrow, D-Augusta, also reported that he lost power, via Twitter.
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The rain paused, but the wind didn’t. When Shannon Busby stepped out of his truck, parked at a closed Walmart in Eatonton, it smacked him in the face.
Welcome to Georgia, buddy.
An employee of Asplundh Tree Expert Co., Busby had made a nine-hour drive from Gulfport, Miss., to Eatonton. His big orange truck, and a dozen more, arrived hours before the ice storm. As Wednesday afternoon lengthened, Busby and others waited for what they considered the inevitable.
“When the winds get stronger, it’ll get worse,” said Busby, a 17-year veteran of ice storms, hurricanes and other events that snap trees. He nodded toward a swath of hardwoods, their bare limbs reaching toward the icy sky. “With all that extra weight,” he said, “they’re going to snap.”
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Seven hours after Vanessa Providence and her family lost power at their home in the Stone Mountain area, the thermostat had backed off to 65.
“We’ve been wearing a lot of clothes and blankets,” Providence, a senior at Arabia Mountain High School said. The family lit candles and moved food from the refrigerator to the back porch to prevent it from spoiling.
The Georgia Power customers had been in touch with the utility company but didn’t get an estimate for when power would be restored. So the family planned to hunker down for the evening with even more layers while hoping for a quick recovery.
Providence’s school mate Josh McCloud and his family were also without power Wednesday afternoon. The homes in his neighborhood close to Chapel Hill Middle School off Flat Shoals Road went dark around 4 a.m. Since then McCloud, who was at home with his father and younger brother, put on extra layers and started a fire.
For him, the power outage and missed school days are troubling.
“The last time we missed days, the day we came back I had two tests and could barely remember what we learned,” McCloud said. “If we keep missing days they will just add on more days and take away our holidays.”
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Once the power’s out, it may be a while before you get it back.
According to a Georgia Emergency Management Agency release on Wednesday, the utilities fix the big lines first. That is, the giant transmission lines, if they’re damaged, then the distribution lines that carry power to hospitals, police departments and schools, then the distribution lines to areas with the largest numbers of customers, and then, if none of those places includes you, you.
Could be that a neighbor’s lights might be restored before yours, but that could be because not all circuits are restored at the same time or one neighborhood could be served by several different circuits.
To report a power outage, please call Georgia Power at 1-888-891-0938 and Georgia EMC at 770-775-7857.
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Nichelle Stephens and her parents lost power late Wednesday morning in south DeKalb County.
“There are icicles on the power lines outside,” she said. “The neighborhood is quiet except for the crackling of the ice.”
Earlier, the windy and icy rain proved to be dreadfully accurate harbinger of hardships to come.
“I called Georgia Power to report the outage and hopefully we will get power soon,” Stephens said. “Thank goodness we have wifi and a baked ham for making sandwiches.”
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A low buzz fills the room as about two dozen Georgia Power employees work the phones and their computers in the company’s “storm center” downtown. They were orchestrating the movements of the thousands of linemen, contractors and other repair employees borrowed from other utility companies ahead of the storm to deal with its aftermath.
Behind the main floor of the storm center, managers in a glassed-in conference room hashed out priorities. And behind them, a wall-sized screen shows the march of the storm’s knock-out combo of snow, sleet, freezing rain across Georgia.
Another large screen showed a map of green, yellow and red counties, color-coded by level of misery. At mid-morning there were two red counties with more than 15,000 customers who then didn’t have power: Clayton (38,281) and Richmond (17,773).
Another large screen kept score of how Georgia Power was doing in its battle with the ice storm. A little after 11 a.m. Wednesday, more than 150,000 customers state-wide had lost power, but the utility’s crews had restored it to almost 36,000, leaving more than 114,000 to go.
Five hours later, the total affected customers had swelled to 244,000, but Georgia Power had caught up with 113,000 of those, leaving 130,000 still without power.
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A tree fell on a house in northeast Atlanta Wednesday morning, trapping an 88-year-old woman in her bedroom under insulation and sheetrock.
About 5 a.m. Wednesday, Oliver Surry was asleep when “a loud noise on the backside of the house” on Martha Avenue jolted him.
“I got up and looked in my grandmama’s bedroom,” he said. “She was up under a lot of insulation and sheetrock.”
While Liela Grier has a “little gash over her eye and a little swelling,” Surry said, his grandmother is all right and the house is still habitable.
Still, he said, the entire ordeal was “weird.”
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