About 13,000 powerless in Hamilton County
Saturday, January 30, 2010
About 13,000 EPB customers were still without power at about 2 p.m. Saturday, according to spokeswoman Lacie Newton.
Ms. Newton said all the company's crews as well as crews from outside the county were working on the outages, but nature is working against them.
She said they have restored power to about 1,200 customers in Hixson and 500 in Red Bank only to have power go out in other parts of Hixson and on Signal Mountain.
"As soon as we get something fixed, another tree falls or something else happens," she said.
The outages started around midnight and were the result of icy trees and ice itself coming into contact with power lines.
The hardest-hit parts of the county were Signal Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Soddy-Daisy, Hixson, Bakewell/Sale Creek and Red Bank, each of which had more than 500 homes without power, according to EPB's Web site. The Ooltewah-Collegedale area and East Brainerd each had between 100 and 500 without power.
Robert McCarty, spokesman for the Volunteer Energy Cooperative, said there are about 250 "scattered outages" in Bradley County, with about 300 in Rhea County, 300 in Cumberland County and 50 in McMinn and Roane counties.
Mr. McCarty said crews have dealt with the largest outages but are now in the "painstaking process" of getting power restored to a few customers at a time in the scattered areas without power.
