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.
The Chattanooga-based Tennessee Valley Public Power Association coordinates mutual aid among its member municipal and cooperative utilities across the 7-state Tennessee Valley. More than 100 lineworker crews from local power companies like EPB were deployed to assist TVA distributors in western Kentucky and Tennessee after devastating tornados caused extensive damage in the Kentucky cities of Mayfield and Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Lexington, Tennessee.
Additionally, the association has offered assistance to state-level associations that are providing service to cooperative utilities in Kentucky and Tennessee, including Warren, West Kentucky and Pennyrile Rural Electric Cooperative Corporations in Kentucky and Gibson Electric Membership Corporation, which serves portions of Tennessee and Kentucky.
Tennessee Valley Public Power Association spokesperson Nathalie Strickland said crews from Florida and other neighboring states are standing by to provide subsequent waves of assistance, but she said lodging and food services are devastated in the hardest-hit areas, "so sending lots of crews in at once is difficult right now.
"Additional waves of assistance will be needed in those areas as rebuilding occurs," she said.
TVA spokesperson Jim Hopson said there is no monetary estimate of the damages so far.
"Our focus is on doing everything necessary to safely restore power as quickly as possible," he said.
TVA has more than 160 line workers working to restore power and additional contractor line crews assisting.
"Because of the extensive damage to both the TVA transmission system and the individual distributions of multiple local power companies, we can't speculate on full restoration timing," Hopson said.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.