Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMCs) Continue Restoring Service

TUCKER, Ga., Jan. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- At 9:30 a.m., EMCs report approximately 5,300 customers without power across south central and southwest Georgia, down from 16,000 yesterday and 45,000 at the peak of the storm. 

Work took place through the night and continues by hundreds of local EMC crews, EMC line workers from across the state, private contract crews, and additional right-of-way crews who are on-scene and involved in the restoration process.

Crews are working in areas in the direct path of tornadoes which hit this weekend and in counties included in Gov. Nathan Deal's emergency declaration. In addition, they are restoring service to some of the most heavily damaged and rural parts of their systems and can work for hours to restore service to a handful of customers.

EMCs caution members to be mindful of the following safety measures to ensure the safety 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.

The EMCs expect outages to drop throughout the day and night but some customers should expect that restoration will continue for a few days.

Georgia EMC is the statewide trade association representing the state's 41 EMCs, Oglethorpe Power Corp., Georgia Transmission Corp. and Georgia System Operations Corp.  Collectively, Georgia's customer-owned EMCs provide electricity and related services to 4.4 million people, nearly half of Georgia's population, across 73 percent of the state's land area.

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SOURCE Georgia EMC