[Editor's note: Numerous scattered power failures occurred Saturday as a result of lightning strikes during thunderstorms over Fayette County. Customers trying to report outages were unable to reach the electrical supplier for much of the county. See Page 5A for two columns about recent outages. The following is a news release in its entirety from Coweta-Fayette Electrical Membership Corp.]

Coweta-Fayette EMC restores service despite BellSouth goof.

Over the weekend, severe storms pounded parts of Fayette and Coweta counties, with Fayette receiving the brunt of Mother Nature's impact. Power outages were heavily concentrated in Fayette. and Coweta-Fayette EMC employees responded quickly. Their “Power Rangers,” a group of immediate-response professionals who respond within 45 minutes of a report of an outage, worked until 5 a.m. Sunday to restore power to Fayette residents.

Unfortunately, due to a BellSouth error, an erroneous message greeted EMC member/owners when they tried to report power outages. This message mistakenly told customers the phones at Coweta-Fayette EMC had not yet been connected (or similar message).

“At the time of the outages, we were unaware that customers were being misdirected by this inadvertent phone recording. This did not prevent us from working around the clock to restore power as quickly as possible,” commented Michael Whiteside, EMC president and CEO. “However, we realize that the inability to reach our offices at such a crucial time may nave created undue frustration. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our valued customers. We will work hard with BellSouth to prevent future problems.”

Coweta-Fayette EMC provides electricity and natural gas to over 61,000 member/owners in one of the nation's fastest-growing areas, including Coweta, Fayette, South Fulton, Heard, Meriwether, Spalding and Troup counties. The company has worked hard for over 50 years to keep costs down, charging a fair price for electricity, providing reliable electric service and contributing to the local community through a wide variety of activities like Operation RoundUp. Last year, the EMC introduced subsidiary company Relyco to manage an array of new services and products, including security systems and monitoring pagers, long distance and Internet service.

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