‘I was freaking out’ Mother impacted by widespread outage in Jefferson County - WATE 6 On Your Side

'Mechanical failure' caused Jefferson County outage impacting thousands

DANDRIDGE, Tenn. (WATE) — Thousands of people were without power Wednesday morning in Jefferson County. Jefferson County Schools and even some businesses had to close due to the outage.

Dandridge resident, Nikki Jones and her 5-month-old son Kye Jones, were two of several Jefferson County residents who woke up Wednesday morning without power.

“I woke up at 6:30 to make his bottle and the power was out,” she explained. “I called my husband immediately because I was freaking out and he said the power was on when he left here. So, I know it had just gone out.”

Jones said she was worried about keeping herself and Kye warm, not knowing when the power would come back on.

Jones continued by saying, “He [her husband] told me just to light a bunch of candles around the bedroom. So I lit a bunch of candles and it kind of kept us warm, you know warmer than it would have been, and I just kept him bundled up, me bundled up. It was pitch dark in there.”

Josh Compton with Appalachian Electric Cooperative said it was a mechanical failure that caused the outage.

“First and foremost, I just want to make it clear that this was not a blackout,” he explained. “This was a mechanical failure on a 69 kV transmission line owned by Appalachian Electric Cooperative. So, this had nothing to do with TVA.”

Compton said at the moment, they’re not sure what exactly caused the mechanical failure but said they had over two dozen employees out in the field working to fix the issue throughout the morning.

“At about 6:20 this morning we had about 13,614 members out at the peak of the outage,” he said. “Around 7 o’clock or so we restored around 2,000 of those members. I’m happy to report the majority of those minus a few residual outages have all been restored as of lunchtime.”

Jones’ power came back on around 10:30 Wednesday morning and she had a message for the electric company.

“Thank you for working so hard to get our power back on,” she said. “I know you guys were working hard and we do appreciate your efforts.”

Appalachian Electric does have plans to completely repair that section of line in the next couple of months.