EMCs Restore Power to Thousands Today

TUCKER, Ga. – As of 8 p.m., Georgia’s electric membership cooperatives (EMCs) are reporting approximately 286,000 customers without power, down from a peak of 550,000 customers last night. EMC crews and additional personnel have worked non-stop and made considerable progress.

Tropical Storm Irma caused more than a half million EMC outages, making this a historic event for electric cooperatives in Georgia. EMCs predicted severe damage and have arranged help from 14 states including Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

However, after conducting the initial damage assessment, and crews identified the sheer number of downed trees, power lines and power poles, it became clear that Irma and the resulting restoration process would be unique. It affected every part of the state and every EMC to some degree. In addition, many outages occurred in remote areas, in areas with impassable roadways that will require days of work in some instances to clear debris and trees before work can begin on the distribution network.

Consequently, EMCs have said restoration will span days, not hours, and advise members to consider making alternate arrangements if necessary and to follow their local EMC outage updates provided in newspapers, TV and radio, social media and EMC web sites.

During restoration, EMCs caution members to be mindful of the following safety measures for the protection of the public and EMC personnel:

• Do not try and remove trees or limbs that have fallen onto power lines.
• If using a home portable generator, never run it indoors and never plug it into any part of the house. Doing so may feed electricity out of the house to power lines outside your home, causing serious injury or death to an EMC employee who is working on downed lines or a member of the public who comes into contact with a downed power line.
• Continue to use caution and stay away from downed power lines. This is especially true in wet situations and even more so with standing water as a result of this storm

Note: Another update will be provided at 5 a.m. tomorrow. Meanwhile, for the latest outage information, go to https://georgiaemc.com/storm-center/current-outages.

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