Wednesday night’s storm knocked out power to 7,800 Chattanooga area homes when strong winds and heavy rains toppled trees and limbs into EPB electric lines.
But the city-owned electric utility said the power outages would have been more than twice as high without the fiber optic smart grid that EPB has built over the past seven years.
EPB crews restored power to all but about 3,000 customers within a few hours, EPB spokesman J. Ed.Marston said. As of 5:30 a.m. today, about 500 customers were still without power.
“Because of the nature and severity of the damage, EPB projects that remaining repairs will be completed later today,” Marston said in a statement early today..
Marston said today that the smart grid helped prevent or auto-restored power to more than 8,700 customers who would have otherwise experienced a duration outage. As a result, a storm that would have knocked power out in more than 16,000 homes and businesses only effected about 7,800.