96 hours after storm, 21K MLGW customers remain without power - FOX13 Memphis
96 hours after storm, 21K MLGW customers remain without power | News | fox13memphis.com
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - For four nights in a row, Antonio Livingston has paid to put his seven children up in a hotel.
“It’s not good for your budget,” the Raleigh resident said. “It’s not good at all.”
A massive tree cracked on Bolen Huse Road and took out the electricity of the whole neighborhood.
Livingston doesn’t have a generator.
"I wish,” he said.
In Bartlett, Mallory Birke has poured hundreds of dollars into powering her generator. Most of her neighbors have left to stay in hotels.
“We're calling and they're telling us that power has been restored,” she said. “We're like, 'No, it's not.'”
She said her daughter is autistic and struggles to cope with the heat. Birke also said she’s lost power seven times in the month of June.
“If a bill comes out and there's extra charges on there because of all this, they're going to have a lot of people pissed off,” she said.
Doug McGowen, the president and CEO of Memphis, Light, Gas and Water, still did not have an estimate as to when power would be restored.
“I want to say to all of those customers, I'm sorry for what you're going through,” he said.
FOX13 asked if he could assure the community that this level of outage would never happen again.
“No, I cannot assure you that this will never happen again,” he said. “Just like the folks in New Orleans when Katrina hit were hopeful that there would never be another tropical storm that came through a hurricane. The weather is going to have those kinds of impacts.”
He did say that MLGW customers should not have to pay for the millions in damage.
“We have emergency funds for this,” he said. “So this will not have any impact on anyone's utility rates because this is built in to the kind of operation that we do.”
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