KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The tornado in Knox County left a mess behind, and thousands of people like Olivia Kaiser are without electricity in the days following.
She said they were receiving the storm alerts, but they didn't think it was a big deal at first. By 2:30 p.m. their home had lost power.
"All the kids freaked out," Kaiser said. "We've got a five, a three and a six-week-old and we lost our internet, we lost the TV, anything that keeps the kids busy was gone."
Things escalated and without electricity, her husband's medical equipment didn't work. Her baby Phoebe is six weeks old and had a hard time with the heat as temperatures reached more than 80 degrees.
"She was sweaty and started throwing up because of it," Kaiser said. "He (her husband) has seizures that are triggered by not sleeping with his CPAP machine."
They tried to store some food in a freezer in their garage, but it didn't work.
"Everything in our fridge had to be thrown out the next morning," Kaiser said.
According to Steven Proffitt, manager of overhead construction at the Knoxville Utilities Board, the storm led to one of the largest restoration efforts that the utility company has ever seen.
They had a lot of trees down and broken poles that complicated their work, because of the amount of time that takes to replace those poles. It has been all hands on deck, and they also received extra help from surrounding counties.
"Without a doubt, I would imagine it will be in the top-five largest restoration events that KUB has worked," Proffitt said. "We've got crews in here from neighboring utilities — Morristown, Lafollette. We've got crews from Kentucky, crews that have come to help us from West Tennessee, and a multitude of contractors."
The last time crews worked this hard to restore power was in 2011. Proffitt said they had a little more than 120,000 customers that went dark that year. Around 61,000 customers lost power following Monday's storms.
"It was more widespread in 2011 because it went across the entire seven-county system," Proffitt said. "This one we do have outages in all of our counties, but the majority of those outages remain and still remain in the West Knox County area."
KUB's concern is the next round of storms the National Weather Service is predicting for Wednesday night and Thursday morning. They say they will work around the clock to get everything back to normal, but it will take a few days.
Kaiser's power was restored on Wednesday.
"I was so relieved and the kids started to scream from downstairs we have power back on," Kaiser said.