Coastal Electric is prepared for Hurricane Matthew

Coastal Elec­tric is mak­ing last minute prepa­ra­tions for the expect­ed winds of Hur­ri­cane Matthew this week­end. We expect this storm will pro­duce con­sid­er­ably more dam­age to our elec­tric dis­tri­b­u­tion than Trop­i­cal Storm Her­mine near­ly a month ago.

We encour­age Mem­bers to pre­pare for pow­er out­age dura­tions of 12 to 36 hours. We have addi­tion­al sup­port crews from oth­er Geor­gia elec­tric coop­er­a­tives who will arrive Fri­day and will be staged to begin work as soon as the eye of the hur­ri­cane has passed or ear­li­er if it is safe. We have five addi­tion­al relief crews who can arrive Sun­day if need­ed.

We are fre­quent­ly asked if there is a med­ical pri­or­i­ty list. As much as we would like to offer med­ical pri­or­i­ties it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to restore pow­er to an iso­lat­ed home in an area when the main feed­er lines to that area are still down.

If you have a med­ical con­di­tion that requires you to have unin­ter­rupt­ed elec­tric­i­ty we sug­gest you fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions of your coun­ty emer­gency man­age­ment direc­tor and make plans now to move to a safe loca­tion until pow­er can be restored to your home.

Our pri­or­i­ty is always to restore pow­er to the great­est num­ber of peo­ple in the short­est peri­od of time. We work first to restore the high volt­age trans­mis­sion lines, then sub­sta­tions, fol­lowed by our main feed­er lines then sin­gle phase taps and last­ly, indi­vid­ual ser­vices.

We will con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the path and fore­cast of Hur­ri­cane Matthew and adjust our storm response pro­ce­dures accord­ing­ly.

For the lat­est details fol­low us on Face­book at http://Facebook.com/MyElectricCoop

Our out­age map is here: http://oms.coastalemc.com/OMSWebMap

Fol­low us on Twit­ter at Coastal­Elec­tric­Coop