NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — When the arctic cold came through Middle Tennessee last month, thousands of people lost power due to rolling blackouts. Councilmember Joy Styles said her district was the most affected and is demanding change.
Styles said plans are already underway to make sure families do not go through that again. There’s an 18-month plan in place to specifically improve service in southeast Nashville.
Thursday night she'll be hosting a community meeting with NES and TVAofficials to talk through what went wrong during the outages and what’s being done to improve the systems. Families that were affected are encouraged to attend and ask questions.
“We have a lot of multigenerational living which means you cannot assume a single-family home has a traditional family size of four living in it,” said Styles. She said that means families are potentially using a lot more water and power than normal, so there needs to be better planning.
Cane Ridge and Antioch in Styles’ district had the largest outages with 20,000 total without power. She said TVA is going to make a significant investment in that area to have more of a presence and that NES is also stepping up its communication plan for severe weather in the future.
“There’s work to be done and we cannot kick the can any further down the street. It is literally a dead-end street at this point. So now we do the work," said Styles. "We invest in the grid, we make sure the load capacity is where it needs to be and if anything else happens in the future we make provisions, if we need another transformer, we get that transformer.”
The meeting is happening in Room 2 of the Community Center inside the old Global Mall in Antioch at 6 p.m.