My fellow members,
We are on day 5 of our Hurricane Helene restoration efforts. We have good news to report. Initially, we had some 13 substations out of 29 that did not have transmission service available. Currently, 3 substations do not have transmission service. Two in Brooks and one in North Lowndes County. Our ability to make progress in restoration requires that the substation have that transmission service.
Our total workforce continues to work 16-hour days every day. The number is up to 770 personnel. We are actively seeking to grow the number of working personnel and may achieve 1,000 workers.
I believe that Colquitt EMC has approached this storm in a very organized fashion. We have gotten the resources that we need, and we continue to add to those resources as they become available. I believe our purchasing agent has kept us stocked with materials, even when we seemed to be using quite a bit of that same material. We truly believe we are giving our best effort, and this effort translates into restoring service to our membership in the quickest time possible. it may seem as if restoration is going slow, but there is a lot of work being done. We are still surveying how many broken poles and downed trees we are up against in many areas. The severity of the damage of this storm makes it difficult to give restoration time frames. The terrains that we serve are far different than that of other local utilities. There are a vast number of trees that still need to be removed for crews to get to these areas and perform work.
We are grateful for the patience of our members as we seek to restore service to each of you. When you are affected by an outage, it never seems that the effort is moving fast enough to restore service. We will continue to work and keep you updated as we have information. Thank you again for your patience and your prayers as we work to restore power as quickly and safely as possible.
Sincerely,
Danny Nichols
President/CEO