Weekend Storms Leave Over 5,000 Without Power

The storms that came through Saturday morning and brought along with them strong winds throughout the day on Saturday left thousands without power Saturday morning. At one point Saturday, over 5,000 customers were without power throughout the Newport Utilities service area. By Saturday night, crews had returned power to roughly 80% of customers. As of this morning, there were still just a handful of customers without electricity…most of those in the Del Rio area in the eastern part of Cocke County. The majority of the power outages over the weekend were due to a TVA feed to a Cosby substation going down. Newport Utilities switched over to a different feed to get a lot of customers back on line while the TVA made their repairs.
It wasn’t just Cocke County that was affected, Jefferson County at one point had 14 roads closed throughout the county due to downed trees. The good news is we did not see the devastation some parts of west and middle Tennessee were subject to in these storms.
Nine people died in McNairy county when an EF-2 tornado ripped through that county Friday. Three people died from storms in Shelby County, One on Henry County and one in Tipton county. There was one fatality from the storms in East Tennessee and that was in Roane County west of Knoxville. That happened when the roof came off a dugout blew off of a sports complex in Rockwood, landing on a woman and child. Both were transported to the hospital where the woman later died from her injuries.
259 homes in the state were damaged by the storms according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.