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By BRENDEN SAGER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
Special sauce? Check. Lettuce and tomato? Check.
Only one problem. "We couldn't toast our buns,"
said McDonald's cook Kiki Clay.
Clay's and several other downtown Atlanta
restaurants were faced with a mob of hungry
downtown workers Tuesday and no power to prepare
their lunches. Clay's McDonald's, near the
corner of Peachtree and Ellis streets, was one
of several Georgia Power customers left without
electricity from about 12:45 to 1:15 p.m.
Lynn Wallace, a Georgia Power spokeswoman, said
electricity went out in the area of Peachtree
Center, Ellis Street and Houston Street. Some
major downtown institutions were affected,
including Georgia-Pacific, Georgia State
University and the Ritz-Carlton Atlanta hotel,
she said.
Wallace said the utility was investigating the
cause of the outage. Most restaurants and
businesses downtown did not face serious
disruptions.
Nevertheless, sit-down restaurants experienced
mismatched and misplaced orders, causing vexing
difficulties for servers.
Mecca Hawkins, a waitress at Hooters restaurant
on Peachtree Street, said she had trouble
matching orders.
"It was chaos," Hawkins said. "I lost some
money. [Customers] were just sitting around
looking at each other."
Several people went into the street to find out
what had happened.
Travis Lamont was working at the McDonald's when
the restaurant had to shut down. He said the
scene was reminiscent of the recent Northeastern
power blackout, when thousands of New Yorkers
hit the streets in what became an all-night
party.
"That's what I thought it was going to be like,
in New York," Lamont said.
Greg Guest, corporate spokesman for
Georgia-Pacific, whose headquarters is at 133
Peachtree St., said the outage had no major
effect on operations.
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