My fellow members,
Our work continues at a steady pace. Currently, in Colquitt, Worth, Tift, and Brooks Counties, we have more or less restored service to all members. Exceptions will be the members that have damage to their structure that doesn’t allow us to restore service without repairs made by the electrician. For more information on which portions of the service are the member’s responsibility and which belong to the cooperative, please visit our website (https://colquittemc.com/outages-weather-updates/who-owns-what ).
We are essentially down to restoring service in Berrien and Lowndes County. As of 6 AM, we have roughly 923 meters without service in Berrien, and we have a little over 3,000 meters in Lowndes County. We are making excellent progress in each of these counties. As I stated yesterday, we believed we would complete Cook County by today, and we have. I stated that I believed we would restore service to Berrien by Thursday, and we are expecting to hit that target. Finally, we appear to be on track to have power back on in Lowndes County by Sunday morning.
Colquitt EMC is hesitant to provide definitive dates and times of when service will be restored because there is always so much uncertainty that it makes it difficult to provide predictions and estimations on power restoration. Earlier in this outage event, we released information on some of the contributing factors as to why we do not give restoration estimates. You can view that information here, (https://colquittemc.com/outages-weather-updates/hurricane-helene-restoration-update).
Anytime an outage of this magnitude affects an electric cooperative, there are always rumors surrounding power restoration. Allow me to dispel a current rumor that we are made aware of. The rumor is we are sending construction crew personnel from here down to Florida to prepare for this next hurricane event. Let me be clear: We have NOT released any construction crews and don’t intend to release any until service has been restored to all members.
Here is a breakdown of line crews assigned to our service area with outages.
Cook – 2 crews – mostly completing clean-up efforts around the county.
Berrien – 24 line crews – outages in Berrien are confined to a couple of small areas.
Lowndes – 88 line crews – the majority of outages are located in central and southern Lowndes County.
We also have right-of-way crews dispersed throughout the affected areas.
As you are aware, Colquitt EMC has six offices located in Moultrie, Tifton, Valdosta, Adel, Nashville, and Quitman. Currently, Moultrie and Tifton are open for business. Adel, Nashville, Quitman, and Valdosta are closed for business. This is so personnel can be utilized in storm restoration efforts. As of today, we plan on reopening those offices on Monday morning.
We recognize the difficulties of not having electric service. We want nothing more than for all members to have their service restored. Rest assured that Colquitt EMC has done and continues to do everything in its power to have the resources required to restore service and is utilizing those resources to achieve that goal. We thank you again for your patience. We are getting close to completing this outage restoration effort. We thank you for your prayers over not only our employees but all of those affected throughout the southeast.
Sincerely,
Danny Nichols
President/CEO