MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Patience is running thin for thousands of MLGW customers without light or air conditioning after a storm ripped through the Mid-South Sunday morning.
A mix of crews from MLGW and other states have been working around the clock to get power fully restored. At its peak, 48,000 MLGW customers were affected, and for some, it has been days since their lights turned on.
“We’ve been out of power the past few days,” said Juan Mejia who lives in Parkway Village.
These have been familiar words for several MLGW customers now looking towards portable gas stoves and generators to get power into their homes, and prevent food from spoiling. Unfortunately, these outages have been becoming more common for people like Mejia and surrounding neighbors.
“We used to live in an area before and we had bad weather sometimes, but we never had power go off every time, now it’s pretty much every time,” said Mejia.
Several other MLGW customers have taken to social media to voice their concerns and frustrations.
Even the text alert system took a hit from Sunday’s storms, shutting down for several hours due to the amount of outages and technical issues. A spokesperson with the utility company says the system should be back up and running as of 2 p.m. this afternoon.
MLGW is in year four of its five year improvement plan, focused on upgrading substations, replacing electric poles, and increasing tree trimming. However, there continue to be worries repairs are not happening fast enough on the utility company’s aging infrastructure.
“It’s probably why we have so many power surges, all the systems are too old and they can’t handle anymore. Everything is getting weaker,” said Mejia.
MLGW expects nearly all affected customers to have their power back on Tuesday evening, with everything restored by Wednesday.