It will be the end of summer before TVA expects to have all of its damaged high-voltage transmission power lines repaired, Chief Operating Officer Bill McCollum said Tuesday.
In the meantime, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s power grid “will not be as robust as it has been,” he said.
But for now, about 95 percent of the distributors that receive power from those transmission lines – including EPB – again are receiving electricity, and the rest should be in a matter of days, he said.
Last Wednesday’s record-setting outbreak of tornadoes decimated more than 300 TVA power towers that carry electricity away from the utility’s power plants, downing more than 90 transmission lines.
“The damage done by this storm is unbelievable,” McCollum said. “We have high-voltage transmission structures, normally standing 120 to 150 feet in the air, now rendered into twisted heaps of steel.”