Winter Storm Fern is long gone- national media attention has already shifted to this weekend’s nor’easter– but her impacts are still being felt in the southeastern United States, where ice accumulation and high winds disabled critical electric infrastructure.
As of Thursday morning, hundreds of thousands of customers are still without power in Tennessee and Mississippi, and another 50,000 were waiting for the lights to come on in Louisiana.
Hardest-Hit Utility Territories
The hardest hit utilities by total outages remain Nashville Electric Service (90,685) and Entergy (75,117), but several smaller service providers are still working to restore power to roughly half of their customers, including:
- North East Mississippi EPA: 19,266 customers without power, or nearly 63%
- Tallahatchie Valley EPA: 17,728 customers without power, or about 62%
- Tippah EPA: 12,704 customers without power, approximately 45%
- Tishomingo County EPA: 9,609 customers without power, or around 61%
- Alcorn County EPA: 8,986 customers without power, or 38%
Fern toppled more than two dozen transmission lines owned by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that feed power to small utilities across Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and iced over others.
Entergy estimates that at least 30 of its transmission lines, 860 poles, and 60 substations went out of service through the storm. The utility says more than 55% of all customers experiencing outages across its systems have been restored, with full service targeted by the weekend. Northern Louisiana, particularly along the I-20 corridor, including Ouachita, was hit hard by ice and freezing rain, according to Entergy, while parts of Mississippi, from Southaven to Natchez, also experienced severe winter conditions. As of Wednesday night, distribution damage assessments show approximately 1,630 poles, 5,760 spans of wire, and 380 transformers damaged in Entergy territory; transmission damage assessments show 10 substations, 20 transmission lines, and 270 miles of lines out of service. Approximately 40 substations and 20 transmission lines have been returned to service.
Nashville television station WSMV reports that an unknown number of Nashville Electric Service (NES) customers are receiving text alerts claiming their power has been restored, even though they remain without electricity. Brent Baker, NES vice president of utility operations, told the outlet that the alert system was created within the last year and believes the false alarms may be attributed to power being briefly restored before damage to lines causes electricity to go back off.
“This is probably on record as the most severe outage NES has ever had,” said Baker.
NES has identified at least 380 broken poles across the service area, and has been staffing hundreds of line workers to repair damage. The utility says it has deployed more than 930 line workers, from Florida, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Mississippi, and Tennessee, with crews working extended 14-16 hour shifts in rotations.
“There are parts that look completely normal, and there are parts of the county that look like they’ve exploded. There are power poles down on multiple roads, and stretches of roadways are impassable,” Mayor Freddie O’Connell said during a press conference on Wednesday. “So even getting that assessment through all of that has been even more challenging. That’s one of the reasons we’ve continued every day to scale capacity to get through that.”
Neighboring Middle Tennessee Electric boasted more than 600 line workers earlier this week, responding to thousands of outages.
Winter Storm Fern’s impact is already historic. Two dozen states issued emergency declarations in response, and the storm affected more than 10,000 flights. As of January 28, at least 106 fatalities have been attributed to the storm, and more than one million people lost power.
This weekend’s nor’easter is expected to intensify into a bomb cyclone, delivering heavy snow, strong winds, and coastal flooding from the Carolinas to New England. It has been named Winter Storm Gianna by The Weather Channel.
