NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — As families brace for subzero temperatures, Nashville Electric Service (NES) has already been working around the clock to limit the number of outages.
Extra crews have been called in to try to get ahead of the winter storm. They’ve been hard at work trying to limit any impact for customers.
“We are prepared during outage times for our call center to have extra calls coming in. We have a staff that works around the clock and we have some overflow of call centers that help us sometimes in need,” explained Brent Baker, Vice President Chief Customer and Innovation Officer with NES.
Weekend floods left roughly 10,000 outages across Middle Tennessee and as winter weather rolls in, more could come.
“A lot of crews worked Saturday night [and] all day Sunday to get power restored back,” Baker said. “The crews are prepared for this weather that’s coming in as well, so same kind of thing — being able to respond overnight and in the morning.”
While eyes are on the sky, NES crews are also keeping an eye on power lines due to the threat of snow building up on nearby trees.
“If snow builds on trees, sometimes that will cause something to fall into a line and that usually is the main cause of an outage in stuff like this,” Baker said. “If it is ice, then our wires and our poles themselves will get stressed, so we’ll have some responses there.”
Most importantly, NES has reminded residents that if they see a downed power line, assume it’s live, stay away and call 911 immediately.
Should outages occur, customers should report it by calling 615-736-6900, attaching your phone number to your account and texting “OUT” to 637797, logging into the NES website or reporting it directly to the outage map here.
Don’t forget to take the power and reliability of the WKRN Weather Authority with you at all times by downloading the News 2 Storm Tracker app.
