SATURDAY UPDATE:
Several thousand electric customers in Cobb remain with power, and a number of roads are still closed due to downed trees and power lines.
On Saturday afternoon Sewell Mill Road was closed off at Benthill Drive, also close to Pine Road, which can be used as an alternate.
A little further up in the Mountain Creek neighborhood of East Cobb, reader Tracy Cullo sent in photos of her house getting hit by trees early Thursday morning.
She reports that everyone is safe; the tree landed on a roof and nearly missed one of her daughter’s bedroom windows by six inches.
Send us information about conditions in your area, and photos to share, if it’s safe for you to do so: editor@eastcobbnews.com.
ORIGINAL STORY:
Earlier Thursday we got a reader photo of a downed utility pole and trees across Sewell Mill Road.
As the sun came out Thursday afternoon, the same vicinity of Sewell Mill, on either side of Bill Murdock Road, had been blocked off.
There are downed power lines amid the trees, and there was no sign of any work crews that had arrived to repair the damage.
We took the photo above at the intersection of Sewell Mill and Mooregate Drive, the entrance to The Oaks subdivision, and it was one of many areas closed off to traffic and likely will be into Friday.
We drove around some other areas of East Cobb and can report that Robinson Road is closed at Fox Hollow Parkway, near Indian Hills, as Cobb DOT crews are on the job cleaning up a significant amount of downed trees and electrical crews are repairing power lines.
A bit west of that, also along Robinson Road, tree damage was serious at Fullers Park Drive, and the westbound stop sign also had been blown down.
We also saw that Old Sewell Road is closed off at Brookcrest Drive, at the southern entrance to the Gant Quarters subdivision.
We’ll be adding more road closures here as we get them; as of 4 p.m. Cobb DOT hadn’t issued a specific list.
Period updates by Cobb government are being provided on the county website.
As of 4 p.m. Thursday, many, many traffic lights are still out in East Cobb, including at major intersections, creating lengthy bottlenecks.
If you come to an intersection without a functioning traffic signal, treat it as a four-way stop.
The wind and rain that swept through East Cobb early Thursday morning from Hurricane Zeta left massive amounts of tree damage, with limbs, leaves, pine straw and other debris strewn about the area.
At 3:30 p.m. Thursday, the Cobb County School District announced that all Friday classes were canceled, but extracurricular activities would go on depending on whether a school has power.
More than a million metro Atlanta electricity customers lost their power during the storm, and quite a number of them in Cobb are still without power.
Cobb EMC reported that as of 4 p.m. Thursday, 50,000 of its customers are without power, and it has restored service to 42,000 customers.
If you’re a Cobb EMC customer, here’s an outage map that shows several thousand customers also without power, but no estimates are available yet.
Georgia Power also is reporting customers without electricity in East Cobb and has an outage map and the estimated number of customers without electricity.
Also be on the lookout for damage on side and neighborhood streets, which figure to be the last to be cleaned up by work crews.
Here’s a tree nearly pulled out of the ground in the front yard of a home on Octavia Lane at Octavia Circle, between Roswell and Sewell Mill Roads and west of Old Canton Road.
Reader Ann Maxwell sent in the photo below of some new visitors to her neighbor’s back yard in the Murdock Road area, after the storm knocked down a fence.
Send us information about conditions in your area, and photos to share, if it’s safe for you to do so: editor@eastcobbnews.com.
Get Our Free E-Mail Newsletter!
Every Sunday we round up the week’s top headlines and preview the upcoming week in the East Cobb News Digest. Click here to sign up, and you’re good to go!
