Washington County, Tenn. -- Friday's winter storm left tens of thousands of homeowners and renters cold, and in the dark this weekend.
If you're reading this article from a home computer, you're one of the lucky ones. Many communities in our region have been without power for days, with little hope on the horizon.
The Johnson City Power Board is in better shape, after a lot of overtime hours this weekend. Five-thousand customers lost power Friday, when heavy, wet snow blanketed Washington County. Sunday night, one-thousand remained.
The power board's substations are up and running, but power crews continue to deal with downed trees, power poles, and power lines.
Spokesman Robert White said, from here, the company targets individual breakers in descending order -- the ones serving the highest number of homes are repaired first.
"If we can serve as many customers as possible, with groupings, perhaps we can get the majority on quicker," White said.
The McKinley Mobile Home Park on Emory Lane is one community on a small breaker. Residents there think the power board should take the age and health of their customers into consideration too.
McKinley has several older residents, and some of them rely on oxygen tanks.
"Start knocking on doors here, you're going to find a dead body," Thomas Latham said. "Probably an old person in their 80s and 90s, that will be frozen to death," he said.
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