JEFFERSON COUNTY, Tennessee — Power has been restored to all Appalachian Electric Cooperative members after an outage affected about 13,000 people on Wednesday. Power went off a little after 6 a.m. and was restored around 12 p.m.
The power outage was caused by a piece of equipment that failed according to, Josh Compton, the general manager and executive vice president of the co-op. He said a switch failed on a power line that carried electricity to the co-op's members across Jefferson County and some parts of northern Sevier County, which resulted in power outages. He also said there was no way to know when an outage would happen because of faulty equipment.
"We have thousands of miles of distribution line and hundreds of miles of transmission line," said Compton. "We don't know exactly what's going to happen on each switch or line or transformer. We wish we did, maybe at some point we will with AI or some other advancement in technology, but we would have no way of knowing specifically that this individual switch would have just failed like it did."
Compton said while the switch was older, there's no way to know for certain the exact reason it failed because other switches on the line weren't affected.
All Jefferson County students were out of school for the day because of the power outage.
The Director of Schools for Jefferson County Schools, Dr. Tommy Arnold, said half of the schools were without power Wednesday morning, which is about 70% of the district's population.
"Initially, we heard it may be an hour and a half or so, which would get us around the start of school," said Dr. Arnold. "And then we found out it was going to be a much longer time period. At 6:20 and 6:30 in the morning, we're already running buses. So we went ahead and ran the buses all the way through their route, and brought all students to school. Once car riders started arriving around 7:15, we turned them back home and made a call out to all our parents and employees canceling school for the day. And then we gave about 30 minutes of time for parents to receive that one call. And we release buses to take children back home."
Dr. Arnold says power outages don't always impact the school day, but because of the cooler temperatures and not knowing when the power would be back on, canceling school was the safest thing to do.
"Just a normal power outage, 30 minutes, even an hour, we would remain in school," said Dr. Arnold. "So we have emergency lights that guide students, we have natural light that comes into our buildings. So it's not going to affect the day. But a morning when it's 19 degrees and we have issues of an extended power outage and uncertainty — we found it best to go ahead and cancel school and send students home, which turned out to be a good decision."
Schools weren't the only things closed. Many Dandridge businesses had a late start because of the lack of power.
The manager of Dandridge Brewing Company says his business opens at 11 a.m., so it didn't make much of a difference.
"We pretty much started on time," said Jeff Depew. "Maybe a few minutes late. We put out a Facebook post to all of our patrons that it could be a little delay but we were back in the saddle before it was too late."
Depew says he was out walking his dog in the morning when the power went out and all the street lights turned off. He says he's thankful for AEC's work on getting the power back on.
And for those wondering if an outage could happen again, Compton said it could but he doesn't think it will happen often.
"We strive for no outages and the best reliability as we can, just like any other utility company, but there will be at some point, another outage," said Compton. "I hope it's not consistent, I don't want it to be consistent — it will not be consistent. We will have a debrief of this situation, just like we did with winter storm Elliott, with TVA to explain what went wrong here to ensure it does not happen. Again, I just want to point out that this was an equipment failure on a switch, that switch was approaching the end of its life. And we actually had planned to replace that entire line from the substation over the next several months."
Compton also said he wants people to know that this was not a blackout, but a power outage.
"When there's a blackout, we don't have the power available to send to our members," said Compton. "This was not a blackout. We had the power available, and TVA had that power available. A section of our line failed, so we couldn't push that power to specific areas of our system."