LEILA FADEL, HOST:
One of the affected areas that Joel just mentioned is Nashville. So let’s get the view from there with Freddie O’Connell, the mayor of Nashville. Mayor, good morning, and welcome to the program.
FREDDIE O’CONNELL: Good Morning, Leila. Thanks for having me.
FADEL: So it’s been a rough weekend with the ice and snow. You’ve declared a state of emergency. How is your city doing this morning?
O’CONNELL: It’s a challenge, you know, taking us from last week when we saw forecasts range from half an inch of snow to up to 32″. I mean, we just saw some wild data in some of the forecasts.
FADEL: Yeah.
O’CONNELL: And so we knew there was going to be a major winter weather event. So pretreating by Friday, Saturday morning, you know, 48 hours ago, light snow falling, 24 hours ago, you heard trees just snapping, cracking, even booming across the city because there was this half of inch of glaze of ice on just about everything. So it has been very, very challenging. We were talking with our local utility, Nashville Electric Service yesterday. They think this may be the largest number of power outages they’ve ever encountered as a utility, ranging up to about 230,000 yesterday. So…
FADEL: Wow.
O’CONNELL: …I mean, just to give you a sense of the scale of the impact that, you know, yes, worst ice storm in more than 30 years, we, overnight, restored about 50,000 people to power, but that leaves us with another 175,000 or so people to get back online.
FADEL: Is that your biggest concern right now? I mean, what is the challenge with getting that power back up for people?
O’CONNELL: Yeah. The power would be less of a concern, except that also overnight, we saw temperatures start to fall precipitously. We’re expecting temperatures today to hover in the low single digits. And so that is what’s a huge concern is just the people of – safety even in their homes. I mean, you know, with the road conditions being what they are from the combination of snow and ice over this winter event, we do want people generally not to be on roadways, but that’s – we also have opened dozens of warming locations, and it’s a challenge because even getting to those warming locations, if you are in a home that is starting to get very cold inside with no heat, it’s just a very, very challenging situation.
FADEL: Yeah.
O’CONNELL: So we’re looking at every transportation option and all of the things to keep people safe.
FADEL: Do you have the resources you need to try to clean up the streets, to get the electrical grid back up and running?
O’CONNELL: Well, on the one hand, yes, on the other hand, there’s just ice on everything, right? So we have more snow plows – more modern snow plows than we’ve ever had for treating roadway conditions. We are going to surge our utility capacity to have more than 300 line crews out there working today. And we’re very fortunate to have other areas sending us support in that regard. But, you know, I mean, I guess that’s – the hard part is with 175,000 people offline, it’s hard to have the resources to just turn them all on in the next hour because of all the utility poles that are down because of all the trees that are, in fact, blocking access to many things. But, you know, we can clear trees. We have plows. We have line crews. So everybody has been working around the clock to try to resolve all these issues.
FADEL: Have all your residents survived this storm?
O’CONNELL: I have not yet heard any reports of confirmed fatalities, but this is also such a challenging environment. I mean, it’s an interesting scenario where last week, Thursday night, we had our point in time count, which means we were out trying to identify people who lacked housing security, people who were living outside or in shelters. And so now here we are trying to make sure that we can even identify people’s conditions in their home. So there’s still a lot of work to be done.
FADEL: Freddie O’Connell is the mayor of Nashville. Thank you so much for joining the program this morning.
O’CONNELL: Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATCHHOUSE’S “COMING DOWN FROM GREEN MOUNTAIN”)
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