Straight-line winds gusting to over 60 mph from a system of thunderstorms crossed Candler County and southern Bulloch County from the west Tuesday evening, damaging roofs, knocking down trees and leaving about 30,000 Excelsior EMC and Georgia Power customers in the dark.

Several thousand of those local customers remained without power Wednesday morning, including Nevils Elementary School and Stilson Elementary School, which the Bulloch County Schools opened for the day so that students would have somewhere to go. But with the power still not restored, the school system allowed parents to pick up children as an excused absence and provided an 11:30 a.m. early dismissal for bus riders. Power to both schools was restored by about 4 p.m.

Bulloch County Public Safety and Emergency Management Agency Director Ted Wynn was at Nevils Elementary when interviewed by phone Wednesday morning about what had happened the previous evening.

“Our CodeRED system worked flawlessly last night and started giving out the first warnings a little bit before 7 o’clock,” Wynn said. “When in the middle of all this I contacted the National Weather Service, what they described was some of the strongest straight-line wind signatures that they had seen in a long time.”

From Candler County, the strongest winds crossed southern Bulloch, impacting an area from Register across the Nevils community and into the Arcola area, he observed. Although 7 p.m. was roughly when a warning of the approaching storm appeared on CodeRED, a contracted, high-speed notification system serving Statesboro and Bulloch County, the worst of the wind actually passed through between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.

“And we’re continuing to work today to get some of these roads cleared, primarily roads that involve power lines down,” Wynn said. “As the power companies get those cleared out, we’re coming behind them to get the roads done.”

About 10 county road crew employees worked from about 8 p.m. Tuesday until 3:30 a.m. Wednesday clearing trees and limbs from roads, and a full crew of about 30 was back on the job a little later, said Alexis Knox, administrative coordinator for Bulloch County Public Works. All roads were passable as of late morning but cleanup continued, she said.

The Bulloch County Fire Department assisted the Nevils and Stilson schools by hauling water in tanker trucks which were positioned at each school so that the toilets could be flushed, Wynn noted. These schools are served by well systems requiring electricity.

Bulloch County sheriff’s deputies and Statesboro police had directed traffic, including at some major intersections where traffic signals went dark.

Excelsior EMC

At the peak of the outages Tuesday night, around 10,000 of Excelsior Electric Membership Corporation’s roughly 24,000 customers were without power, said Bronson Bragdon, Excelsior’s marketing and communications director.

“Right now as of this second, we still have 2,668 people out,” he said at 11:20 a.m. Wednesday.

Excelsior, the Metter-based electric cooperative, touches eight counties, but the largest concentration of its customers is in Bulloch, Candler and Emanuel counties.

“Every outside employee we had was out working last night, and they are back today,” Bragdon said.

Excelsior’s approximately 30 line workers plus five retirees were continuing the work Wednesday morning, assisted by crews from some other electric co-ops, contractor Pike Electric and right of way contractor Georgia Right of Way.

“This was a really large outage for us and we’ve got a good ways to go, but we’ve got all hands on deck and we are plugging along to get everybody’s lights back on for them,” he said.

The outage map at outage.excelsioremc.com still showed several hundred customer outages as of 5 p.m.

Georgia Power

With the storm system not limited to the Statesboro area, statewide Georgia Power experienced hundreds of thousands of outages Tuesday night. Before most were restored, the company had 20,000 customers out in the Statesboro area alone, reported Tess Newton, a Georgia Power regional communications specialist.

“We've restored power to about 300,000 statewide with under 100 left to restore in our area. At peak we had 20,000 out in our area,” she stated in a 3:45 p.m. Wednesday email.

“We are continuing to monitor and are prepared to respond to additional severe weather that is expected in the state in the coming days,” Newton wrote. “We will continue to update our map with the latest information as crews remain in the field.”

The map is at https://outagemap.georgiapower.com.

Wynn knew of no injuries reported from the storm. Although some homes and other buildings were damaged, mainly by falling trees and limbs, he said he had heard of no homes destroyed in Bulloch County.

Group of storms

What passed through the region Tuesday was a group of thunderstorms, technically known as a mesoscale convective system, said Brian Haines, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Charleston, South Carolina.

“Imagine a couple of thunderstorms get together. They can produce really strong wind,” he said. “That’s what ended up happening yesterday. It was one of those events that was straight-line wind. It can be just as bad as some of the other weather that we get around here. In fact, it can affect more people.”

In other words, no tornadoes were involved. But straight-line winds from this type of system can affect multiple towns and counties, Haines noted.

At the Metter Municipal Airport, a 64 mph gust was recorded, he said.

The complex of storms originated southeast of Macon, in the area of Jeffersonville and Allentown, and traveled east as far as the Savannah River, according to NWS observations.

“We were at around 50 storm reports from yesterday,” Haines said. “A lot of those storm reports were ‘multiple trees down’ in (for example) Metter, southeast of Statesboro, Brooklet, Stilson, Arcola.”

For future storms, people can send reports and photos to the National Weather Service office at Charleston through its public email address, nws.charlestonsc@noaa.gov.