Here’s how Georgia Power restores your electricity without a bucket truck

Just because you don’t see a crew working on the downed power line in your neighborhood doesn’t mean electricity can’t be restored to your home.

That’s been the case Monday with Tropical Storm Irma in Columbus.

The peak number of outages so far was at 1:36 p.m., when 30 percent (26,207 out of 86,325) of Georgia Power’s customers in Muscogee County were without power. But despite the winds still being too strong for bucket trucks to lift linemen into the air, Georgia Power managed to restore electricity to 5,426 of those customers in less than 2 hours.

Depending on the severity, a temporary fix can be made without a bucket truck one of two ways: either remotely from a control station or in tandem with a lineman on the ground, Georgia Power spokesman Robert Watkins explained in an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer.

And sometimes, he said, it’s simply a matter of a limb falling on a power line, cutting of the electricity, and the limb falling off the power line and the electricity restoring itself. That’s probably why some customers lost power and regained it within seconds, he said.

So while Georgia Power waited for the winds to subside below 35 mph to start deploying bucket trucks, some customers still got their electricity back on. Watkins estimated 100 Georgia Power workers were on the ground in the storm Monday afternoon, doing logistics, switching lines or making damage assessments.

Asked how many crew members would be deployed when the wind subsides, Watkins said, “As many as we can get. With the whole state hit like this, it’s going to spread our resources.”

Crews from Alabama Power and Mississippi Power are on standby to help, he said.

Watkins put the Columbus outages in perspective: They were the most in the city since Hurricane Opal in 1995.

To report an outage, call Georgia Power at 888-891-0938 or go online at GeorgiaPower.com.

This story was originally published September 11, 2017 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Here’s how Georgia Power restores your electricity without a bucket truck."