For City of Thomasville Utilities customers, the impact of Hurricane Helene began on Thursday night, September 26, with strong winds and heavy rain which resulted in early electric outages Friday morning of more than 4,450 customers. Thankfully, the City of Thomasville was not hit as hard as expected, as the storm shifted east-northeast, sparing Thomasville from a more severe outcome and, unfortunately, significantly affecting neighboring counties and states.
“We were preparing for a direct hit, as all models put Thomasville right in the middle of the storm as it moved inland,” said Chris White, City Manager. “This included urging our residents to prepare for what we anticipated to be extended outages of up to ten days. As part of our normal pre-storm operations, we also began reaching out to mutual aid crews well before the storm so that we would assistance on the way prior to the storms impact.”
Mutual aid crews answered the call for help and began arriving in Thomasville on Thursday from as far as Oklahoma and Louisiana. Having the additional assistance was needed, as outage number quickly rose to over 8,000 by late Friday afternoon. White said that restoration efforts began as soon as the winds died down enough to allow crews to safely operate.
The City’s hardest-hit areas included neighborhoods around Glenwood Drive, Clay Street, and Mitchell Street. The Old Monticello Road area was heavily affected by downed trees, with broken poles affecting restoration timing due to extensive repairs. More than 40 poles were broken across the electric system.
“Our restoration efforts include not only our Electric team, but nearly every other area of operations as well,” he said. “From our Public Works team to other utilities like Natural Gas, Water and Wastewater, it is literally all hands-on deck. Our communications team is also a key component of our storm response in addition to other administrative personnel who keep our crews moving behind the scenes.”
Beginning Friday evening, city and mutual aid crews were still working to restore power to customers when CNSNext, the City’s local telecommunications operation, experienced a widespread outage due to the impacts of Hurricane Helene on the network’s transport to Atlanta. “We have three paths for our Internet traffic to Atlanta,” explained White. “You can think of these as highways taking you to the Internet hub in Atlanta where all large providers have a presence, including CNSNext.” White explained that it is highly unlikely to have all three paths affected, but Hurricane Helene did just that. “Thankfully, we were able to work with other state providers to implement a solution quickly to restore service to CNSNext customers quickly.” By Saturday evening, the only CNSNext outages that remained were due to power outages that were not yet fully restored.
White said that the City’s Electric system should reach full restoration by end of day on Tuesday, a much shorter duration than what was originally feared. “We can certainly attribute the quick resolution of Helene’s impact on Thomasville to the quick action and coordinated assistance from Team Thomasville - electric, telecommunications, solid waste, and public works crews – as well as the visiting mutual aid crews. The work of these individuals has been vital in addressing the storm's aftermath and aiding Thomasville’s recovery process.”
"Our town is blessed to have utility crews, staff members, and neighboring municipalities prepared to support Thomasville during potential catastrophic events,” said White. “We advised our residents to prepare for a severe ten-day event like Hurricane Michael, and we came in under the predicted outage time. The restoration efforts of the team have enabled our community to safely return to school and work, kept our health facilities active, and ensured the safety and security of our neighborhoods."