This is day six for thousands of homes on the Plateau with no electricity.  The ice storm that came through last Friday night and Saturday morning is still causing lots of stress for thousands of families who have struggled just to function over the past week – some with no heat, others very low on food.  Some didn’t make it.  TEMA has revised their weather-related death total to 29 but it’s so very sad that even one person died as a result of the storm.

All communities have come together to provide aid to those who have been devastated to a degree not seen on the Plateau in modern times. Volunteers have delivered food and supplies to thousands of homes, shelters have been set up for people who simply had to evacuate their home. Utilities and road crews have been working hundreds of man hours to restore the power as rapidly as possible. Those who are still without power are being stressed to the limits, taking the first few days in stride – but with more and more days piling up without electricity a feeling of despair is beginning to set in.  Not only are residents being put to the test, but so are the utility crews who are working 16 hours a day trying to get the lights back on. Hundreds of workers have been working in shifts since last week-end to clear debris, replace broken utility poles and transformers and string new lines.  And those crews have done wonders given there were 30,000 or more who lost power on day one.  The latest count of homes without power is at 7,500 within the VEC service areas;  Cumberland– 5146; Fentress – 429; Overton – 549; Putnam – 608; White – 733; Bradley – 24.  Additional crews are in place from Sequachee Valley Electric Cooperative, Upper Cumberland Electric Membership Corporation, and Caney Fork Electric Cooperative, bringing the number of workers to about 500, with over 100 crews on the job.  

With another bitter cold weather system coming through tonight, many will be bundling up and trying to stay warm without the luxury of heat.  Cumberland County has had one weather-related death of an elderly man who was found deceased with a generator running inside his house producing deadly carbon monoxide. If you are one who has no electricity please do not operate any kind of heat which requires fuel to burn inside your house without proper ventilation. And we can’t stress enough for people to check on your neighbors, family and friends who are still at home with no power.  Hopefully, in a day or two, everyone will have their electricity back on and can start working to get life back to normal.  But none of us will soon forget the ‘big freeze’ of 2015 and hopefully will have learned from this disaster and be prepared for the next time – for it seems that if a weather catastrophe is going to strike somewhere, be it ice and snow storms in the winter or tornadoes in the spring and fall, the Cumberland Plateau gets hit the hardest.