My fellow members,
As you know, Hurricane Helene has been a significant hurricane and has devastated our system. It has exceeded the damage that we have seen from prior storms such as Idalia and Debby. The windspeed that was attributed to Helene was more than 140 mph at landfall. I believe Idalia was around 120 mph at landfall. With this storm, there are roughly 1,000 broken power poles that need to be changed out in comparison to roughly 500 broken power poles with Hurricane Idalia.
Due to Helene, cell phone and internet services have been affected and practically unusable yesterday and this morning. We hope this will improve throughout the day today. Also, transmission service to our substations has been greatly disrupted. Colquitt EMC has 29 substations. A substation is where we pick up electric service and distribute it to our 73,000 meters. During Idalia, we had approximately 5 substations that lost service. As of last night, 13 of 29 substations were without transmission service. The majority of these are in Lowndes and Berrien counties. The greatest cause of these outages is broken transmission poles and structures. We are waiting for Georgia Transmission Corporation and Georgia Power to restore service to these stations.
So how about some positive news? At its peak yesterday morning, Colquitt EMC had approximately 67,000 meters without service. Since yesterday, we have brought that number down to approximately 56,000 meters without power. We are optimistic that once service is restored to the substations, we could see significant improvement. In comparison to Hurricane Idalia, Colquitt EMC began that restoration effort with 200 service personnel. Over the first three days of that outage, we ramped up manpower total to 450 workers to restore service. With Hurricane Debby, we retained a similar 450-line personnel number for the entire 4.5-day outage. With Helene, we recognized the potential severity early on and were able to obtain extra resources early on. By mid-morning today, we will have approximately 770 construction and right-of-way workers at Colquitt EMC.
My fellow members, there is nothing more important to us than restoring your electrical service. We are working diligently to get it restored. Once again, we ask for your patience. This will not end quickly. We ask for your prayers. There are always hazards that show up and increase when restoring power after a major storm. Thank you for all that you have done for us. We will have another update this afternoon.
Sincerely,
Danny Nichols
President/CEO