ATLANTA – Astrid Palomares boarded up her Colquitt County home, stocked up on bottled water and food, and awaited Irma’s fury.

So when Hurricane Irma weakened to a tropical storm before thrashing its way through southwest Georgia, the Norman Park woman was relieved.

But that relief soon morphed into frustration.

Her electricity went out Monday during the height of the storm, and she and her family, including eight foster children, spent the next four days crowded around a single light at night and cooking all their meals outside on the grill.

“By the time it hit us, it was such a weak storm,” said Palomares, a Colquitt EMC customer who was on the verge of abandoning her home for air-conditioned hotel rooms when her electricity was restored. “Can you imagine if it had hit us with a lot more strength?”

Irma made landfall in the Florida Keys on Sunday morning, Sept. 10, as a Category 4 hurricane but lost its hurricane status before it reached Georgia.

Still, the massive storm packed 60-mile-per-hour winds and even more powerful gusts. Those winds stretched out more than 400 miles beyond the storm’s center, enveloping the entire state. Three people were killed in Georgia.

Nearly two weeks later, federal, state and local officials are still assessing the extent of the damage, which includes a trail of destruction stretching from South Georgia pecan orchards and the state’s coast up to north Georgia mountains. It is likely take a month to tally Irma’s devastation in Georgia.

But the mass power outages that left the Palomares family and others in the dark – in some cases, for nearly a week – provide a glimpse of the storm’s widespread impact. More than 1.5 million outages were reported all across the state at the storm’s peak.

The behemoth storm prompted Gov. Nathan Deal to declare – likely for the first time in Georgia’s history – a state of emergency for all 159 counties. Deal has cautioned that recovery will be slow because of how widespread damage was.

“It’s not any exaggeration at all to say that we had damage border to border,” Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black said this week, adding he had fences to repair on his farm in Commerce, located nearly an hour away from the South Carolina state line.

Black said it will likely take another three weeks before the extent of the agricultural losses becomes clear. But the early indications are not promising for the state’s prized pecan and cotton crops, which had been poised for a banner year. Already, it looks like 30 percent of the pecan crop could be a loss.

Georgia’s recovery is expected to be costly but Deal said recently on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Political Rewind” the state would be careful not to “over ask” Congress for aid.

“If you don’t over ask, people pay a lot more attention when you do ask,” Deal said on the radio show.

Damage-assessment teams comprising both state and federal officials began their work sizing up the statewide public losses Tuesday, according to Ruben Brown, spokesman with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Because of the number of counties involved, the work is expected to take at least four weeks, Brown said Thursday.

Residents from the five hard-hit coastal counties – Camden, Chatham, Glynn, Liberty and McIntosh – are also eligible for federal aid. As of Wednesday, more than 5,800 people had registered with FEMA for what is known as individual assistance.

For the state’s utilities, Irma will likely be remembered as one of the most devastating storms in state history.

The storm knocked out power for more than a million Georgia Power customers at the height of the storm. Hurricane Matthew, by comparison, took out power for about a half million of its customers last year.

Even Habersham EMC in north Georgia, which is more accustomed to dealing with winter storms and tornadoes, saw 75 percent of its customers lose power during the storm. Some electric cooperatives reported 90 percent of their customers were without electricity.

Most everyone in Georgia had power restored by last weekend.

“We think it was probably the worst storm ever encountered by Colquitt EMC,” said Danny Nichols, the cooperative’s general manager. Nearly 80 percent of Colquitt EMC customers lost power.

Nichols drew comparisons to Hurricane Kate, a storm that ravaged southwest Georgia in 1985, and the 1993 Superstorm that dumped snow on the South and caused widespread outages.

Irma’s relentless winds knocked down trees throughout the state.

In Moultrie, city crews picked up 129 tons of yard debris in just the first two days of post-storm cleanup – nearly three times the amount usually collected.

In Lowndes County, crews responded to about 400 reports of downed trees, with nearly three dozen of those trees causing building damage.

“A lot of consumers may not see any trees down in their yard and wonder, ‘Well, why? It wasn’t that big of a deal,’” Nichols said of the lengthy outages. “They don’t realize there are weaker trees that are more exposed to the wind than others.

“It’s just a potluck kind of thing,” he added.

Nichols said the electric cooperative had to replace more than 120 of its poles in a seven-county coverage area and had to deal with at least 1,500 downed trees. Utility crews, in South Georgia and all across the state, worked long hours to restore power.

“We were happy to see them,” said Lisa Fender, a Colquitt EMC customer who lives in Nashville and whose power was restored Sunday, nearly a week after it went out.

Fender said she was fortunate, though. Her family, including her four adopted children, had a generator that kept their food from spoiling and allowed them to cool off in a room with a window unit at night, even if that meant seven people and four dogs piling into that one room to sleep.

Plenty of other families did not have a generator and lost the contents of their fridge. That includes low-income Georgians who stocked their fridge ahead of the storm, only to lose it all.

Some families resorted to calling emergency numbers in search of food, said Amy Lollis, executive director of the Lanier County Family Connection.

The state will replace the food stamp benefits, but that takes time. The local school system, residents and churches have tried to fill the void in the meantime.

“This whole community has really stepped up,” Lollis said.

Without access to their stove, the Fender family grilled out daily and happily received home-cooked meals from others who had electricity.

Fender’s family dusted off Monopoly and other board games to pass the time. They also just sat around and talked to one another – something Fender said they realized they do not do enough. They have even decided to start a weekly game night.

“It was not horrible,” Fender said of the outage. “But I wouldn’t want to do it again anytime soon.”

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for The Valdosta Daily Times, CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com. Kevin Hall in Moultrie and Thomas Lynn in Valdosta contributed to this report.