The tornadoes that swept through a half dozen states Saturday and killed at least 90 people also toppled hundreds of electrical lines and left more than 250,000 households and businesses in the Tennessee Valley without power, at least temporarily, over the weekend.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which serves parts of the storm-devastated region in Tennessee and Kentucky, said Monday that power has been restored to more than half of those initially affected and TVA personnel continue to work to repair damaged power transmission equipment in the areas hit by the recent severe weather.
Initial damage assessments to TVA’s power system – the nation’s second-largest transmission network with over 16,000 miles of high-voltage lines – were completed on Sunday and confirmed that the weekend’s storms were the most destructive in the region since the April 2011 tornado outbreak. TVA spokesperson Sandy Perry said at least 100 transmission towers and poles were damaged or destroyed, and 29 TVA transmission lines were knocked out of service.
Immediately after the storms, more than 20 customer connection points – the interface between TVA’s system and local power companies – were offline. As of Monday morning, TVA said nine TVA transmission lines that directly supply electricity to local power companies remained out of service and were the primary focus of TVA’s current restoration efforts.
Most of the outages in the TVA region occurred in Kentucky and western Tennessee, and local power companies in the storm-damaged areas are working on restoring power to thousands of homes and businesses where lines or structures were damaged.