More than 5,000 Cumberland County residents remain without power as of 5pm Wednesday afternoon.
Volunteer Energy Vice President of Marketing and Economic Development David Murphy said around 1am, the cooperative had over 36,000 accounts without power across the Upper Cumberland. The majority were in Crossville and Cumberland County area. Murphy said the biggest issue they have been dealing with is lines that have been damaged by fallen trees.
“Straight-line wind really is one of the worst things that we have to deal with just because the tree canopy in our area is so dense,” Murphy said. “You know we are allowed to clear our right of way, but most of the trees that are falling into these powerlines are falling from outside of the right of way.”
Murphy said crews first start addressing outages closer to the substation. Muphy said those who live farther away from the substation will experience the longer outages.
“That’s just the nature of the beast,” Murphy said. “They are gonna be the last ones to get turned back on. The reason for that is if they have a broken utility pole right in front of their home and we go out there and fix it and there is 10 other broken utility poles between them and the substation, the power will not come back on just because we fixed the pole in front of their home. We have to fix all those others.”
Murphy said crews are currently working to identify all outages in Crossville and that a timeline for when power would be restored is unknown.
“We are really able to give that information to them,” Murphy said. “It’s not because we haven’t identified a problem it’s just we are not sure we have identified all of the problems. So, until we’ve completely fixed the first issue that we identify, we won’t know if there are other issues that are downstream that we get to identify.”
Murphy said weather has hampered repair times and with a winter weather advisory in effect for Wednesday night, it could take longer to restore power to Crossville and Cumberland County residents. Murphy said crews are working around the clock and will not stop until all areas have been restored.
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