Mayor Cooper: “What an incredible community we have.”
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NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) — Nashville Mayor John Cooper opened his Wednesday morning press update praising our community’s response to the disaster that has hit Middle Tennessee.
Cooper noted that although Nashville had a tough day yesterday, the response from our community “was beautiful.”
He said more than $670,000 had been donated to the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, not including supply donations from Amazon, and a $100,000 donation from Google.
He noted too that with the scale of volunteers stepping up to help – he has never been so inspired.
Between 5,000 and 10,000 people have registered to volunteer for cleanup efforts with Hands On Nashville, which has caused the hon.org website to crash a few times.
Representatives from FEMA Region 4 are on the ground assisting in search-and-rescue efforts. Cooper said that fortunately so far there were no reports of missing persons in Davidson County.
There were four shelters open around the city housing 90 people, and Metro Housing had placed 86 displaced families in hotels last night.
There are still over 35,000 NES customers without power, and crews from Piedmont Natural Gas have been working hard as well in the affected areas, making sure any gas issues are taken care of quickly.
The Mayor, Chief Swann, and Chief Anderson all noted that people have constantly been offering to volunteer, even so far as people from other states who happened to be driving through, stopping wanting to help.
NES said that the Metro area has experienced over 700 broken power poles, and crews from many other states are here helping to restore power.
By way of comparison, when the tornado of 1997 went through Nashville, it broke 200 power poles.
There are still three times as many poles still broke, over 600, in addition to three power substations serving different affected areas.
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