Power restored to local schools, county

For the second day in a row, the Pike County high school and middle school were without power, leaving students, administrators and teachers in the dark. Power was restored to the high and middle schools around 11:25 a.m. Wednesday and power to both schools was restored around 10 a.m. Tuesday. Power to all Pike County residents using Southern Rivers Energy was restored by Thursday morning.”Crews worked well into the evening last night to finish restoring power to a handful of individuals. The high winds over the last two days caused problems for many utilities across the state,” said Erin Cook of SRE. “Tuesday morning over 3,000 outages were reported with restoration efforts completed around 12:30 p.m. while Wednesday reports of more than 5,000 rolled in the early morning hours. SRE crews worked all day with additional EMC and contract crews to restore power for everyone. We are looking forward to nicer weather over the weekend. Thanks to our members for their continued patience and to our linemen, dispatchers and employees for all their hard work!””We believe the power will be on before lunch. In a situation the power would be out all day or if we did not have the ability to feed them, we would institute our early release protocol,” said superintendent Dr. Michael Duncan. “With the severe weather alerts, they are safer at school than being at home alone.”According to Erin Cook of Southern Rivers Energy, there are approximately 650 power outages in a four-county area as of 11:45 a.m. Wednesday. ”Crews are making progress with outages down from over 5,000 early this morning to approximately 676 as of 11:30 a.m.,” said Cook. “Two additional crews are on the way to assist with restoration efforts from Middle Georgia EMC in Vienna in addition to help from Harper’s Tree Service. The majority of the remaining outages are in Meriwether, Pike and Lamar counties. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we continue with restoration efforts.”Cook cautions everyone to stay away from any fallen power lines or trees or limbs that may be touching a line. Members can call our outage hotline at 1-866-244-4890 to report outages and check our outage viewer at http://68.208.12.169:82