MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Saturday’s storms and Monday’s rain knocked out power for thousands of Memphis Light, Gas and Water customers. As of now, fewer than 200 customers are still waiting for theirs to turn back on.
You can see how powerful the weekend’s storm was by going to Uptown where a tree fell and took down a dozen power poles. Larry Bonds was one of around 2,000 customers that lost power because of it.
“Normally, it pops a line and drops them off the pole, but I’ve never seen one break that many poles at one time,” he said. “I was sitting there at my computer, and my wife say, ‘We’re fixing to lose power.’ And sure enough, it went out. We lost power.”
MLGW says customers in the area lost power for about 12 hours.
Gale Jones Carson, with MLGW, says a total of 7,700 customers lost power across Shelby County at one point. “I was amazed and was just thankful. Thankful to God no one was hurt.”
The storm knocked over trees and power lines from Frayser to Raleigh.
“It’s very difficult to put preventative measures in place when you start talking about weather-related outages. Primarily because we don’t know when the weather hits or what it’s going to hit,” Carson said. She says they monitor the weather closely and have crews on standby in events like this past weekend.
Thousand of other customers lost power power with Monday morning’s rain, even though it wasn’t as strong as the weekend’s storm.
“When it rains, it may have been some trees that got some limbs onto our lines. It could’ve been cars that hit our poles, because of accidents,” Carson said. She says, no matter what, they work to restore power as quickly as possible.
Although MLGW says all of its customers have power again, we spoke with people in an apartment complex who still don’t have it. They said their landlords are responsible for getting it back.
