Griffin Director of the Electric Bill Bosch described how Monday’s storm brought power outages and what Griffin Power did to restore power.

“About 6:20 (p.m.), we had a lightning storm move into the Griffin area,” he said.

He described the storm as short but severe. It blew fuses and caused trees to fall on power lines, a situation that in some cases resulted in fires. It caused 19 outages over four different circuits.

“Even though the outages were caused over 30 minutes, the number of the outages and the severity of the outages took about seven and a half hours to restore,” he said.

The outages that took place at the beginning of the storm affected 950 residents, and additional outages affected 400 residents.

Bosch then described how power is restored after an outage.

“We call the on-call crew and being that this was after hours, our on-call crews were at home or somewhere in the Griffin area,” he said.

The crews traveled to the outage sites located by Griffin Power’s system operations center.

“We prioritize by first circuit outages, emergency areas such as hospitals, then we go to individual line outages and the individual customer outages,” he said.

The goal is to get the bulk of customers back online as soon as possible before working on individual customers.

“While we apologize for the time it takes to restore power during a storm event, we would like to assure the public we are moving as quickly and efficiently as possible to get their power back on,” he said.