Nashville’s Power Outage: Icy Trees Outsmart Humans, Win Again
KEY POINTS
- •A fierce winter storm on January 25 left over 78,000 people without power across Tennessee and Mississippi.
- •President Trump approved 12 emergency declarations and deployed 5,300 National Guard members to 15 states.
- •Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell questioned NES’s slow response and created a commission to review the utility’s storm handling.
In what can only be described as 'nature's mic drop,' Nashville and parts of Mississippi have spent over a week frozen and powerless, with 37 dead and nearly 80,000 souls playing human popsicles. On January 25, half an inch of ice gave trees the strength of a WWF wrestler, snapping power lines and leaving utilities like North East Mississippi Electric grimly silent on restoration timelines. Nashville Electric Service boasted scaling to 1,000 linemen in five days but promised power back only by February 9, just in time for Valentine's Day, presumably to let romantics dodge candlelit dinners. President Trump approved 12 emergency declarations and shoved 5,300 Guardsmen into 15 states, while ironically FEMA fired half its workforce and left 19 disaster approvals—11 of them over a month old—in bureaucratic limbo. Mayor Freddie O’Connell formed a commission to grill NES's response, presumably over hot beverages heated on camp stoves, because what’s a public utility disaster without a dash of public finger-pointing?
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Half an inch of ice turns Southern trees into power line assailants, leaving tens of thousands freezing—Nashville's recovery pace slower than your last software update.
They say the grid 'held up' but half an inch of ice took down half the city. Nature's flex game strong.
Nashville linemen scaled up to 1,000 in five days—slow enough for an apocalypse but fast enough to avoid a reality show.
Source: Axios | Published: 2/2/2026 | Author: April Rubin
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