ATLANTA -- Heavy rains over the weekend knocked out power to more than 30,000 customers statewide and led at least two schools districts in the northeast Georgia mountains to cancel classes Monday.
Only about 1,500 customers in Georgia remained without power early Monday afternoon, down from more than 33,000 at the height of the outages, utility companies reported.
Many of the outages were in hard-hit Habersham County, where schools were closed Monday. White County Schools also canceled school Monday.
Fewer than 1,000 customers of the Habersham Electric Membership Corp. were without power early Monday, down from about 13,650 Sunday afternoon, the regional utility firm reported on its website. Most of those outages were in Habersham and White counties.
"This is a major outage event caused by the weather system pounding the East Coast," Habersham EMC said in a statement.
"Many of the outages require hours of work due to the replacement of broken poles and lines, furthermore compounded by the heavy equipment needed to do these repairs becoming stuck in the saturated ground," the utility added.
Before dawn Monday, Georgia Power reported about 2,700 outages statewide, mostly in the northeast Georgia mountains and in the Augusta area. By Monday afternoon, that number had dropped to fewer than 1,000, Georgia Power reported on its website.
The outages were caused by rain and high winds that toppled trees, Georgia Power spokesman Jim Barber said.
In Athens, at least two large trees were toppled in the saturated ground, and traffic lights went out Sunday but were later repaired, The Athens Banner-Herald reported.
In Hall County, several trees were reported down and drivers were urged to use caution as traffic lights in that area were also knocked out Sunday, The Times of Gainesville reported.
The storm was part of a larger system that inundated parts of South Carolina with recording-breaking rainfall.