A severe winter storm that brought heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain has left more than 400,000 homes and businesses without power across a swath of the U.S., from the Ohio Valley and mid-South region to New England.
The hardest-hit utilities included Nashville Electric Service (NES) in Tennessee, where 109,156 of 463,455 customers were without power, and Entergy, with more than 104,000 of its 3.05 million U.S. customers affected, according to PowerOutage.us.
“Both NES and contractor lineworkers from Florida, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Mississippi, and Tennessee continue their work to restore electricity to those still without power after Winter Storm Fern took down half of all NES customers last Sunday,” NES said in a post on X late on Tuesday.
The storm is set to become the costliest severe weather event since the Los Angeles-area wildfires in early 2025, with preliminary damage and economic losses estimated at $105 billion to $115 billion, AccuWeather said.
“All Entergy Arkansas and Texas customers who could safely receive power were restored yesterday. Restoration for affected Louisiana and Mississippi customers is well underway,” Entergy said in a release on Tuesday.
Here are the major outages by state:
State Outages Tennessee 138,099
Mississippi 125,177
Louisiana 81,054
Texas 18,662
Kentucky 15,727
Arkansas 3,719
Georgia 3,616
South Carolina 3,429
Total Out 402,754
(Reporting by Noel John, Sarah Qureshi and Anmol Choubey in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry, Bernadette Baum and Christopher Cushing)