Storm overwhelms utility providers

Tens of thousands without power; many express frustration.

Tens of thousands of Cobb County residents were left in the dark — both figuratively and literally — over the weekend as local utility providers found themselves overwhelmed by heavier-than-predicted snowfall.

Customers attempting to report outages to both Cobb EMC and the Marietta Board of Lights and Waterworks were met with busy phone lines and little to no information online. Many took to Twitter, Facebook and email to express frustration with what they described as a lack of communication.

Others urged patience in the face of an unexpected severe weather event, and expressed gratitude for the workers hustling to restore power. On Monday temperatures

returned to the 50s and helped melt snow and ice, but thousands remained without power and gusty winds threatened to topple trees.

One Facebook commenter, Tracy Lane, wrote on Cobb EMC’s

Facebook page Monday that she had been without power since Friday.

“I have my elderly father with

us and he can’t climb the stairs and has no access to his electric chair lift,” she wrote. “It would be nice if we could even get an ETA. Georgia Power is giving it’s customers an ETA. I don’t understand why Cobb EMC can’t! That’s frustrating.”

Cobb EMC spokeswoman Leslie Thompson acknowledged customer frustration. At the height of the outages, 69,000 out of 180,000 customers were without power.

“It’s not that we were unprepared, it’s just that the damage is really severe,” said Thompson.

She called the snowstorm’s damage “far worse” than that wreaked by Tropical Storm Irma earlier this year. The weight of the snow broke tree branches and a number of telephone poles, in addition to taking out power lines.

“Those are the fixes that take quite a bit of time,” she said.

As for the communication issues, Thompson said the volume of calls simply overwhelmed the system. As employees were scrambling to restore power, they were instructed not to take time to update the website

and to “just concentrate on getting power back.”

Marietta BLW faced similar problems. About 13,000 out of 52,000 of its customers lost power over the weekend.

Spokeswoman Lindsey Wiles called it the worst storm

to hit Marietta’s power grid in 30 years. She said due to a high volume of calls, at times all 48 phone lines for people to call in to report outages were busy.

Customers “would need to call 3-5 times in order to

report an outage,” she wrote in an email. “People were reporting outages via Twitter, Facebook, and my email which I would then send to dispatch to report.”

ALYSSA POINTER / AJC Cobb County EMC linemen Jeremiah Gaddis (left) and Stephen Ramsey work to straighten a utility pole into the ground in order to restore power to some in Mountain Park on Monday.

JOHN SPINK / JSPINK@AJC.COM Things were beginning to thaw out Monday at Chastain Park in Atlanta where Katy Cahill and Katie Baldwin strolled their sons by a snowman left on a park bench.

ALYSSA POINTER / ALYSSA.POINTER@AJC.COM A downed power line rests on the sidewalk along Holly Springs Road NE in Marietta on Monday. Cobb agencies were working Monday to restore power and clean debris for many residents.