Major Weather Pattern Hits Coffee Co. on Wednesday Night

Wednesday night was crazy for weather in Coffee County, but most of damage was in Tullahoma. Residents experienced a brief but powerful storm which left power out, trees down and roads blocked. Police, Fire, Public works, and Utility workers worked quickly to clear roads for emergency access, secure downed power lines, slowed train traffic as crossings were damaged and systematically restored Tullahoma back to some sort of normalcy.
Damron’s Restaurant had to be closed after the roof was ripped from the building and the heavy rain caused damage inside.

Winds were blowing at 60 mph during portions of the storm.
Manchester Fire was brought in for back up as all our Tullahoma fire units were busy across Tullahoma clearing emergency paths for line crews, police and emergency medical responders. At one time, 8 different Fire crews were at 8 different locations with saws clearing a path.

A report from the Tullahoma Utility Authority shows the wide array of issues they dealt with on Wednesday night.
• Around 25 separate electric outage locations.
• 1200 customers out at one point.
• 200 customers out after 3 hours.
• Last customer restored just before 6 a.m. Thursday
• 10-15 customers still without power but they need to have electrical work done before we can connect them back to our system.
• 96 count fiber was broken by a fallen pine tree.
• Splicers worked from 8pm last night until late this morning to repair this fiber. This affected around 50 LightTube customers. They came up as their fibers were spliced, beginning around 9am. LightTube services for these customers should be back up.
• As of Thursday afternoon, LightTube estimates 10-20 fiber service drops are down, which we are working on repairing.

Picture above story: Roof from Damron’s. Photo by Barry West