Power Outage in Snellville & People Driving Into Ditches

Snellville Police, Fire/EMS, and emergency dispatchers certainly had their hands full this morning.

I was at Snellville United Methodist Church when the power went out, and by the time I was out of the building, I saw several EMS and Fire vehicles, so I knew something was going on. By the time I got home, a helicopter was hovering around, so that got me curious enough to listen to the scanner feed of the Snellville Police that's available on ScanGwinnett.com

If you listen to the communication feeds and make some notes like I did, you will see what a great job all our emergency personnel do in Snellville! They can deal with anything from the mundane to the insane in minutes. It's amazing to me how calm they can remain.

So here's what I found out from the Police Scanner feed, along with some of my personal comments.

A little after 10:30 am, a power grid went down, causing most of the center of Snellville to lose power. Power failure of the traffic signals was a huge problem. Power was out from Henry Clower Blvd, areas all around Scenic Hwy/124 in Snellville up to Dogwood Road. Police were kept busy dealing with accidents and directing traffic.

The intersection of Hwy 78 and Hwy 124 is difficult even when everything's working well, but with the lights out, it was mass confusion because drivers fail to recognize that intersection as a 4-way stop if the lights are non-functional. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that one of my pet peeves is that people don't know what to do at a 4-way stop...and those are the non-electric 4 way stops! If you take a 4-way stop that usually has traffic signals, and it doesn't have the signals due to power outtage, watch out, something BAD is going to happen! There was an accident between a moving van and a minivan at 78 and Hwy 124.

Power was restored by 11:30 am, but signals at Hwy 124 and the Snellville Pavilion shopping center needed a key to reset the light, which was flashing yellow. The light wanted to be ornery, and it wouldn't reset, so they had to call out Snellville Traffic Engineers to fix it.

All this is going on, a black Chevy Suburban was stolen, or it was broken into, in front of the Old Navy store on Hwy 124. I'm not sure which it was, I could only hear that it was "theft."

But that was not enough. A 2000 Silver Mercury vehicle was partially in a ditch on Skyland Drive near Street DeVille. The car was registered to someone with a Loganville/Grayson address. Can you believe that people make a special trip into Snellville just to drive into our ditches?!? Do they not have ditches in Loganville or Grayson? They really should get their own ditches. It's just really rude to come here and use our ditches. That's all I'm going to say about that. ;-)

So have a better day than the Snellville Police had! I still don't know why the power grid failed.