Pike storm confirmed as EF-2 tornado

The storm that roared through Pike County has been confirmed as an EF-2 tornado by the National Weather Service.SRE EVENING UPDATE:Crews are still working, with additional help to restore power to the remaining 1835 members without power this afternoon.5:15 p.m.., Tuesday, March 19: SRE crews have been working non-stop throughout the night and additional crews from Harper’s Tree Service, Snapping Shoals EMC, Sumter EMC and Walton EMC joined our restoration efforts and have been working hard all day. We are making progress and the number of outages has been reduced from around 8000 at the peak of the outage to over 1800. Everyone is working diligently to get power restored as quickly and safely as possible. The phone lines are open but due to the volume of calls coming in, members may still experience some busy signals.”The peak winds that we estimate with this EF-2 tornado were about 120 miles per hour,” said Ryan Willis, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Peachtree City. Tornadoes range from EF-1 to EF-5 ‘” which is the most severe.The tornado touched down around 6:10 p.m. Monday in Meriwether County and traveled east into Pike County, Willis said, adding that the twister traveled about 13 miles and recorded a maximum width of about 300 yards.-ajc.com