Habersham EMC officials said roughly 3,000 of their meters remained without power Monday morning, the result of the Friday and Saturday snowfall that hit the area.
In a 7 a.m. Facebook update, officials with the EMC said crews made strides on Sunday and early Monday morning restoring service to more than 12,000 meters. The latest estimate for complete restoration of electricity for the EMC is Tuesday.
As crews worked throughout the weekend, officials with Habersham EMC said it became apparent that issues with their outage system had not been fully resolved after Tropical Storm Irma.
"While efforts were made to offset these problems during the past few days, we could not fully address them in the midst of the large number of outages," officials stated in the Facebook post. "Two major issues were the phone system and the outage reporting system."
To address the issues, the co-op planned to upgrade its existing telephone system before the end of the month. The work is expected to provide more incoming phone lines.
"During the highest call volumes, members were unable to get through to report their outages," the company stated on Facebook.
On the outage reporting system front, officials said an initial evaluation determined the online outage reporting form had not been operating as efficiently as possible. The company disabled the form.
"A complete and thorough evaluation of the current outage management system will begin once all power has been restored," officials stated in the social media entry. "We sincerely apologize to our members. Please bear with us as this process will take some time as the HEMC staff investigates the causes and potential solutions to improve the system."
