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At an apartment complex off of Harding Pike in Nashville on Monday night, a warm offer echoed up and down cold stairwells.
“¡Comida gratis! ¡Hola, hola, tenemos comida gratis! We have free food!”
Volunteers from The Remix Way carried trays filled with individually wrapped hot burritos, handing them out to residents who had been without electricity or heat for two days. They’d been distributing warm meals to cold communities all day, and their efforts would soon include lending some extra body weight to the back of a car struggling to pull out of a frozen parking spot. One resident stepped outside to thank the group for the food. After warning a reporter about a patch of ice on his stoop, he described the way people throughout the complex had been hunkered down together in their apartments.
“We’re all trying to help each other right now,” he said.
It was just one of numerous examples of spontaneous community aid occurring throughout Nashville as the city remained in the icy grip of a historic winter storm. Within hours Monday night, the temperature would drop, once again, into the single digits with a wind chill well below zero degrees. This rounded out three freezing days and nights that saw snowfall followed by sleet and ice, leaving a record 230,000 power outages, according to the Nashville Electric Service — a figure that likely represents as many as half-a-million people. By 2 p.m. Tuesday, the utility said that 129,000 customers were still without power and at least 216 broken utility poles had been reported.
At a media briefing earlier in the day, Brent Baker of the Electric Service said that 700 linemen were currently working on restoring power across the city, with the number expected to reach 925 lineman Tuesday night.
“We understand how disruptive this outage is to customers, and we want to restore quickly and safely,” Baker said.
Around the city, neighborhood coffee shops, restaurants, bars and markets turned into community hubs for warmth and respite. At Duke’s in East Nashville, a large group of people and a few dogs huddled inside to charge cell phones, catch up with neighbors and grab a hot meal. In Old Hickory Village, one of the proprietors of Hamby’s Market stayed in a motorhome outside the store so they could open up early and stay open for neighbors in need of food and warmth.
On Tuesday morning, Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church in North Nashville distributed generators and other supplies donated by the National Baptist Convention, USA Home Mission and World Vision.
In partnership with World Central Kitchen, Maiz De La Vida in the Gulch provided hot lunch and dinner for more than 1,500 people without electricity on Monday and said in a post on Instagram that they were cooking another 1,800 meals on Tuesday. World Central Kitchen also worked with District 17 Metro Council member Terry Vo to serve free meals south of downtown Monday and was helping to financially compensate other area restaurants providing food.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition invited volunteers to participate in community wellness check phonebanking to make contact with residents who might be in need.
Separately on Tuesday morning, the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security announced that Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers and State Homeland Security agents would be conducting “welfare checks on Tennesseans who have not been heard from” during the storm.
The Remix Way’s food distribution effort was supported by several local restaurants, including Acapulco Burrito in Antioch, which provided 1,000 burritos to be passed out Monday and another 1,000 on Tuesday. Brenda Perez said the restaurant, owned by her father Alfonso Perez, had been without power itself until Monday morning.
“It was really a blessing to help out,” she said. “My parents’ house doesn’t have power right now, so they’re staying at my house. So we’re in the middle of this situation, too.”
Cathy Carillo, who co-founded the organization run entirely by volunteers, said the group had gotten some direct requests from families in need of food. But in many other cases, she said as she carried a tray of food from one apartment unit to another, they were responding to the overwhelming number of pleas for help they’d seen on weather-related Facebook livestreams from the Spanish-language news outlet Nashville Noticias.
“I think what Metro government probably doesn’t understand is that the typical ways of communicating in emergencies and educating people don’t apply in communities like ours,” Carillo said. “It’s not like they’re going to read the press announcements.”
The dire situation was only made worse, she said, by fears in immigrant communities about encountering agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Those had prevented many immigrant families from going to warming shelters located at police departments and fire stations. Carillo and other volunteers also said many residents at the apartment complexes they’d gone to were hesitant to open their doors, apparently unsure whether the offer of free food was legitimate.
“We know that those are tactics that have been used in other cities, and we don’t put it past them to come after a community in the midst of a crisis,” Carillo said.
On Tuesday, she told the Nashville Banner that Remix volunteers were heading out to deliver generators and candles to families without power before starting another round of food distribution. She also said two elementary schools had reached out to ask about getting food and other resources for students’ families. With Metro Nashville Public Schools remaining closed until Friday at least, some students are missing what would’ve been their main source for regular meals. Noting again how many immigrant families are fearful of going to warming centers, Carillo wondered why school buildings aren’t used during crises like this.
“If there are all these buildings and places that people already trust and already miss, these places could be incredible resource spaces, especially in the midst of an emergency,” she said.
Though the primary focus remains on response and recovery, Metro officials told reporters Tuesday that they are also looking ahead to after-action reports and long-term response. Asked about moving power lines underground, O’Connell and Baker said the city and Electric Service currently work together to do so for new developments. Twenty-five percent of the system is already underground, Baker said, with that figure rising. Emergency services officials said they, too, would review their agencies’ responses.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.