Paris, TN – As storms rolled through Henry County early Friday evening, Paris Board of Public Utilities (BPU) crews rolled out to begin repairs.
With over 9,000 customers out of power in the initial aftermath, crews were able to get over half of the customers restored in the first few hours. Crews worked tirelessly with little sleep to get power full restored to all customers.
Damage from the storm was widespread with over 129 outages at the peak of the outage and a total of 350 outages over the weekend across Henry County to repair. Crews repaired or replaced 25 poles and several miles of downed wire due to trees and wind. Between office staff, water/wastewater staff and electric department staff along with outside crews called in, over 2,200 manhours were logged in the restoration of the storm.
“We really appreciate McKenzie Tree Service, Covington Electric and Service Electric Crews coming in to assist with restoration,” said Cole Edwards, BPU Director of Engineering. “Complete restoration for all of Henry County would have taken significantly longer without the help of these crews.”
Saturday midday brought another storm into the area, creating additional outages and forcing BPU crews to work in less than favorable conditions. Sunday afternoon a smaller storm passed through Henry County while, crews worked to repair the initial outages and new outages caused by the first two storms. By Sunday, June 23 at 11:00 pm., restoration to all customers had taken place.
“I cannot say enough good things about our employees and their dedication to this community,” said BPU General Manager Terry Wimberley. “This is just one of the advantages of having a public power provider like BPU in Henry County. You have local crews working to restore power in their community-something you don’t often see with private power providers.”
Now that the power restoration is complete, crews will begin the cleanup process. BPU is aware that there are poles, wire and other items that may have been left behind during the storm: at that time, BPU’s priority was getting power restored. Due to the widespread nature of the outage, the cleanup process may take several weeks but crews will be working diligently to complete the process.
BPU officials said, “We are blessed with an outstanding group of employees; from the 16 office staff who came in Friday night to answer phone calls and assist customers with reporting outages to the eight water and wastewater department staff who came in Saturday and Sunday to assist with restoration efforts, to last but not least, our 34 linemen and electric department employees who worked tirelessly to restore power to Henry County. A special thank you to our local restaurants who assisted in getting meals prepared for the crews. And finally, thank you to our customers! Your patience, kind words, and support of our crews was truly remarkable, we are lucky to serve such an amazing community.”
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