Power restored before hottest temperatures arrive in Birmingham
WorkingCrewVisualsforNewsCenter-P-5059-MegMcKinney: Mountain Brook, AL: Alabama Power crews remove and replace utility poles, clear broken cables, and replace, in wooded area of 18 Eden Circle.
Power was restored to all Alabama Power customers Thursday night after storms with heavy winds left 115,000 homes and businesses without electricity Tuesday night.
Alabama Power crews battle topography and foliage to restore power in Mountain Brook. (Meg McKinney/Alabama NewsCenter)
It took just over 48 hours to get everyone restored, and while the temperatures climbed into the 90s those two days, power is back on before the triple digits that are expected this weekend.
Downed trees took down power lines and took out transformers throughout the Birmingham metro and surrounding areas. High winds snapped power poles in some areas.
More than 91 percent of customers had their power restored within 24 hours. Topography and heavy foliage made restoring areas such as Mountain Brook and the Bluff Park area of Hoover particularly challenging for Alabama Power crews.
More than 1,000 additional linemen from Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power and other utilities around the Southeast came to Alabama Power’s aid to get the power back on as quickly as possible.
“Through our direct and private message channel we assisted at least 75 customers via Facebook and another 135 through Twitter,” said Wesley Higgins, technology support supervisor at Alabama Power’s Customer Service Center. “Our team also responded to several other public posts.”
Higgins estimated the customer service team handled more than 2,000 interactions on social media during the outages. There were more than 1 million verified impressions on Twitter and Facebook.
More than 90 percent of customer inquiries on Facebook were answered within five minutes, Higgins said.
Outage and restoration update stories were seen by 6,823 users on Alabama NewsCenter.
To read the Alabama NewsCenter coverage, click on the headlines below:
Severe storms cause significant damage, outages in North-Central Alabama
Assistance rolls in for storm restoration
Getting down to the hardest cases
“Social” response to Tuesday’s storms
Alabama Power climbs every mountain to restore power
Mountain Brook’s natural amenities make power restoration difficult
Power crews gather at a staging area before setting out to restore power to customers.
