My fellow members,
We continue our efforts to restore service to all our members. From a peak number of over 67,000 outages, we now sit at about 48,000 outages. From a workforce perspective, with Idalia and Debby, we had approximately 450 working personnel. With Helene, we are currently at 770 and may continue to ramp that workforce upward as other assets become available. Each time we increase this number, we are entering new territory with managing personnel and ensuring that they work safely and effectively. Those concerns are the only ones we think about before we increase our workforce. I can assure you that the concern is never financial. It is purely about how many we can manage safely.
One concern that has been greater with Helene than with previous storms is transmission service. As a little background, all the high-voltage transmission lines in the state of Georgia are owned collectively by Georgia Power, the city electric systems, and the EMCs. These transmission lines deliver power from generating plants to the individual substations throughout the state. When power is available at a substation, we take the power and distribute it to our membership. When there is damage to the transmission system, that can cause our substations to be without power. If we don’t have power at the substations, our repair efforts in areas served by those substations will not provide service to our members. As an example, during Idalia, 5 out of our 29 substations were without power for a day and a half. With Debby, all stations were energized during the entire outage. With Helene 13 of our 29 stations were without power. That includes both in Brooks County, both in Berrien County, 8 in Lowndes County, and one in Cook County. Restoration of these substations is moving slowly. Restoration of transmission systems is far more complicated than restoring service on our distribution system. Currently, 10 substations are without transmission service. Two more are supposed to be back online tonight and hopefully three more by Tuesday. A question that has come up, is why doesn’t Colquitt EMC repair transmission lines? The answer is it requires a different certification, equipment, and materials. It has been Georgia EMC’s best decision to create a company that deals with transmission issues solely and that is Georgia Transmission. That is the most effective way to maintain reliability is by having people who are skilled in transmission systems work.
While we wait for transmission lines to be restored, we are focusing our efforts on areas that have transmission service. Crews are continuing to work 16-hour days. Crews will continue to work until power is restored to all members. Idalia had 7-8 days of outages and roughly 500 broken poles. We are estimating 1,000 broken poles with Helene. As we have said before, unfortunately, this is going to be an extended outage. Please know we are doing all we can to get power back to our members as quickly and safely as possible. We thank you again for your patience, prayers, and words of encouragement.
Sincerely,
Danny Nichols
President/CEO