7:00 A.M. WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Winds died down overnight in north Georgia but not before more power outages in Habersham and White counties. The Habersham EMC outage map as of 7:00 a.m. was showing 121 outages, including 95 in Habersham and 26 in White. Gusty winds were expected to continue through most of the day across north Georgia.’
EARLIER STORY. POSTED AT 11:30 TUESDAY NIGHT:
Few problems had been reported in the Gainesville by late Tuesday night despite strong, gusty winds that prevailed most of the day and continued into the evening.
At 11:30 Tuesday night, only one of the four electric co-ops serving the area reported any outages. That was Habersham EMC which had 14 outages showing on its outage map – five in Habersham County and nine in White County. Georgia Power, meanwhile, was showing six outages in the area, all in Habersham.
There were some reports to trees across roads earlier in the day. The Hall County Sheriff’s Office, for instance, issued a traffic alert for the Sardis Road/Greenwood Drive where a tree had fallen onto a power pole.
At the Gainesville airport, the National Weather Service (NWS) had by 11:30 recorded 12 straight hours of double-digit winds and wind gusts. The top gust, which occurred between 2:00 and 3:00, was 45 mph.
The NWS had issued a wind advisory for most of north Georgia earlier in the day, but it expired at 7:00 p.m., except for a string of mountain counties from Rome to Blairsville and Cleveland where the advisory was extended until 7:00 Wednesday morning.