After three days of hard work, longs hours and icy conditions, Georgia Power crews have completed restoring electricity to the 235,000 customers who lost power during the winter ice storm that swept through Georgia this weekend. All customers and businesses that could receive service were restored by 1:00 am this morning.

A total of 3,500 Georgia Power employees worked through the frigid temperatures and frozen terrain to restore electric service. The company also received assistance from 2,200 workers from Southern Company subsidiaries Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Savannah Electric and Gulf Power, independent contractors, as well as utilities from Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and the Carolinas.

Georgia Power began with only 250 customers without power statewide Saturday morning. By late Saturday evening, that number had grown to 178,000 statewide. Ice began to stick to trees and limbs and they began falling onto power lines causing most of the outages. Even as linemen worked all day Saturday to restore power to thousands of customers, more customers lost power as the winter weather passed through the state.

At 4:00 am Sunday morning, approximately 235,000 Georgia Power customers were without power across the state, 170,000 in the metro Atlanta area and 65,000 else where in the state including the hard-hit areas near Columbus, Macon and Athens.

“We thank our customers who were patient with us as we worked to restore service as quickly and safely as possible,” said Mike Garrett, Georgia Power President and CEO. “We also thank our employees, staff from Southern Company’s subsidiaries, independent contractors and utility personnel from other states that were involved in this safe and effective power restoration process.”

Georgia Power is the largest subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the nation’s largest generators of electricity. The company is an investor-owned, tax-paying utility, serving customers in 57,000 of the state’s 59,000 square miles. Georgia Power’s rates are more than 15 percent below the national average and its 2 million customers are in all but six of Georgia’s 159 counties.