HEMC director addresses issues brought forth by Winter Storm ‘Diego’

Winter Storm Diego had power crews working day and night in Rabun County and after nearly four days of battling the elements, restoration efforts are nearly complete.

Habersham EMC Director Nicole Dover said of all the northeast Georgia communities, Rabun County experienced the most widespread outages which delayed restoration time due to a number of factors.

“For Rabun County, there were extenuating circumstances as the transmission line which brings power to the substation and then it goes out to the homes and businesses in the area, that was down,” Dover said. “So there was no electricity actually getting to the substation. We, Habersham EMC crews, do not work on those lines. Those are a higher voltage so there are special crews who work on them. So that wasn’t restored until Sunday.”

Dover said that was only one part of the equation crews had to deal with.

“Then we actually had to deal with several places where we had to cut our way into the power lines that were tangled up in the trees,” Dover said. “We also had to set poles where they were broken. Setting a pole is easily a three to a four-hour job and that’s when it’s easy to get to. If you have to cut your way in to get to it or go off the road like we had to do which caused many of our trucks to get stuck, that makes the process even slower.”

Dover said by the close of Tuesday, the goal is to have everyone’s power back on.

“Today, our goal is to have everyone’s power back on but that greatly depends on circumstances that may be out of our control such as road conditions,” she said. “But the bulk of our ground crews are in Rabun County working as hard as they can.”

Dover said since starting their five-year initiative which hopes to clear everything from trees to bushes within 15 feet of every power line, that restoration times can be cut in half.

“We’ve started a 5-year cycle where we are going to reclaim our right-of-way,” she said. “Through that program, we are clearing everything within 15 feet of our power lines, it’s called ‘Ground to Sky.'”