28 Jun TVA, DREMC storm damage leaves nearly 9,000 without power
The majority of today’s outages are caused by equipment damage inside TVA’s Marshall County substation, which supplies power to much of the western DREMC service area. Lightning, fallen trees and downed power lines took a toll on the power grid earlier today affecting approximately 9,000 people at the height of the storm that stretched north to south across Tennessee.
Members in all eight districts of the DREMC service area experienced outages, but the majority affected are the Chapel Hill and Lewisburg areas where the storm damaged some of TVA’s Elk Ridge Substation equipment.
TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) states that repairs ‘will take a while’ since damage is extensive. In the meantime, DREMC is working to temporarily supply electricity to the Chapel Hill and Lewisburg areas via an alternate feed on its system while TVA makes its system repairs. This back-feed process could take up to two hours for DREMC crews to complete.
Staff at DREMC estimates that TVA repairs could take up to eight hours or longer. Once TVA’s repairs are made, DREMC will be able to route power to these areas from the alternate feed back to normal, which will cause a brief, temporary outage for these members later today.
All available DREMC crews and its electric contractors are assisting with outage restoration at this time.
As the thunderstorm band continues to move southeast across the DREMC service area, more outages could occur throughout the day. Please report outages by calling your local DREMC office, by using our mobile app or via our website.
Thank you for your patience as we work to restore power to our members.
To keep up-to-date on DREMC power restoration, you can monitor the progress on our mobile app on our website’s outage map. Our outage map is updated every few minutes.