Work crews from the City of Moultrie clear debris from roadways Thursday, June 15, following a serious storm Wednesday evening.

MOULTRIE — Intermittent storms have brought the threat of severe weather to Colquitt County every day for more than a week.

Some days saw multiple rounds of storms while other days had little or no rain despite the forecast.

The most serious storms to actually materialize were on Wednesday, June 14, when thousands of residents lost power and widespread damage was reported due to wind, hail and fallen trees.

Colquitt EMC, which was hardest hit among local power providers, updated customers through its website and social media.

President and CEO Danny Nichols issued a statement at 8:45 a.m. Thursday that described the challenge the company was facing.

“We recognize that some have been without service since Tuesday evening,” Nichols wrote. “I ask that you understand that power restoration is a sequential process. We must have service at the substations. From there, we must restore power to the main lines and then restore service to the branch lines.

“What complicates this process is the large scale damage that we have experienced since Tuesday evening,” he said. “There are numerous broken poles and toppled trees on our lines. We are sensitive to those who have been without power since the beginning of this storm. I can assure you that we are doing everything in our power to restore service to all of our members.”

Nichols posted at 4:20 p.m. Friday that Colquitt EMC had restored service to all its customers.

Colquitt EMC has 71,355 connected meters and almost 9,300 miles of power lines across parts of seven counties. Customers served by the company’s Tifton office suffered the most outages and were among the last to be brought back online, but at one time Moultrie had more than 1,200 EMC customers without power too.

The City of Moultrie had about 750 customers without electricity Wednesday, but all were restored by 11 a.m. Thursday, said Amy Johnson, city public relations director.

Georgia Power reported only a handful of outages in Colquitt County.

Colquitt County Emergency Management director Justin Cox said there were 175 to 200 fallen trees to clean up across the county. As of 10 a.m. Thursday all roads were open, he said.

The county saw high winds, hail and fallen trees — and structures damaged by all three, he said. Damage is widespread throughout the county. He was not aware of any serious injuries, though.

“Hail sizes ranged from softballs to quarters,” he said. “Southeast corner of the county had the smallest hail and some did not have any.”

Cox said E911 brought in extra staff to handle the workload.

The National Weather Service continued to predict the possibility of severe weather this week with a marginal risk (the lowest of 5 tiers) on Tuesday.

Flooding from heavy rainfall remains a concern, the NWS said in a Tuesday morning email.

Cox said Tuesday morning that he’s not aware of any flooding in Colquitt County from the rains over the last several days.

“More rain and storms forecasted,” he said, “but hopefully not as severe.”

Rain totals

The weather station at the Sunbelt Ag Expo received 0.44 inches of rain May 31 and 0.02 inches on June 1. After that, the station received no rain at all until Monday, June 12. Since then, there’s been rain nearly every day with two days topping an inch of precipitation:

June 12 — 0.5

June 13 — 0.09

June 14 — 1.27

June 15 — 1.02

June 16 — 0.01

June 17 — 0

June 18 — 0.01

June 19 — 0.69

The weather station’s data is available at

georgiaweather.net.