All Habersham EMC customers are now back online after thousands of people ended up in the dark after a weekend winter storm.
Nicole Dover, Director of Strategy Execution for Habersham EMC, said the hardest-hit county in their service area was Rabun.
"In Rabun County alone we serve 4,341 meters and the largest number we had out there was 2,575 meters," Dover said.
Dover said the massive outage started when a tree fell and took out a transmission line that served a Rabun county substation. Then, other trees fell during the ice and snow event, bringing down more lines.
"We had to literally cut our way into some areas in order to be able to put lines back up," Dover said. "You also have a lot of mountainous terrain, and in some cases when we would have to go off-road with our trucks...our trucks would get stuck."
She said 60 additional crew members were brought in to work around the clock, repairing downed lines and blown transformers.
All customers in the Habersham EMC service hour had power restored by 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2018/12/743962/habersham-emc-restores-all-power-after-weekend-storm