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Monday night power outage update
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Utility companies still working on restoring power. - photo by Ted O'Neil

Utility crews have been working since noon to restore power to Bryan County customers.

As of 7 p.m., about 3,500 Coastal Electric and Georgia Power customers in South Bryan remained without power. That is down from more than 16,000 earlier in the day. Another 350 or so Georgia Power customers in North Bryan remain without service. Another 1,000 or so Canoochee EMC customers in North Bryan are without power.

Bryan County Emergency Services and the Richmond Hill Police Department continue to stress that evacuees should not return home until the governor waives the mandatory evacuation that began Saturday for all Georgia residents living east of I-95. THey also ask that those who did not evacuate stay off the roads for the same reason, especially in the dark. 

Officials say fewer people on the road will give power crews easier access to work on downed lines. Some roads are still blocked due to downed lines and trees, as well as flooding.

Depending on your provider, you can find outage updates on the websites of Coastal Electric, Georgia Power and Canoochee EMC.

Bryan County Schools' cancelation has been extended by a day, with no classes until Thursday at the earliest. The city of Richmond Hill also said city hall will not reopen until Wednesday at 8 a.m.

The Bryan County Board of Commissioners' regular monthly meeting, which was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in Pembroke, has been postponed. Chairman Carter Infinger said a new date has not yet been picked.

One item the commissioners were planning to discuss Tuesday was burying power lines along Highway 144 when the state trunkline is widened. Commissioners at first turned down the idea at their August meeting, then decided to table the measure to September.

The city of Richmond Hill voted last month to spend $420,000 to bury power lines along Highway 144 from Timber Trail to Port Royal Road when the GDOT project begins. Council members cited safety, aesthetics and reliability, as underground lines would not be subject to falling trees knocking out power during storms such as Hurricane Irma or Hurricane Matthew last year.

Coastal Electric has said it would split the cost with each municipality, using money it is slated to receive from GDOT for moving power poles.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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