Built Back Stronger: How Two Valley Utilities Rebuilt After Catastrophic Disasters

Lee Brown knew something was very wrong before he could even get back to work. It was the morning of September 27, 2024. The CEO of Erwin Utilities Authority in Erwin, Tennessee, had gone down to check on a small house he and his wife owned near the river. The forecast had called for rain and possible flooding, but nothing outside the range of what this corner of East Tennessee had seen before. Brown had a mental benchmark: the flood of 1977, the worst this community had ever known. He’d assumed that imaginary line would hold.

It didn’t. Brown’s wife, Denise, had called early that morning for help with a leak pouring into their bedroom. After helping her contain it, he tried to drive back to the office — only to find the roads underwater and the interstate closed. He texted the sheriff: no way through. Back home, neighbors arrived with tractors to help clear a mudslide blocking the road. It wasn’t until late that evening that Brown was finally able to get close to town. What he saw defied comprehension — a home, a barn, a two-story brick home, all three washed off their foundations, swept across the interstate, and broken apart over a creek on the other side.

Hurricane Helene had just become the worst disaster in recorded history for Erwin and the surrounding area.

Nearly three years earlier and 350 miles northwest, Clint Woodward, Electric Operations Manager at Mayfield Electric & Water Systems in Mayfield, Kentucky, was in the middle of an entirely different kind of nightmare. It was the night of December 10, 2021, and a violent EF4 tornado with winds up to 190 mph was tearing through the city. One of his linemen, caught out in the open at the electric substation when the storm struck, did the only thing he could: he climbed down into an underground vault and pulled the hatch closed above him. The tornado made a direct hit on the substation.

The lineman survived. The substation did not.

The stories of Mayfield Electric & Water Systems (MEWS) and Erwin Utilities Authority are, in their specifics, very different — one a tornado, one a flood; one in winter, one in early fall. But they share something essential: both utilities had their infrastructure destroyed in a matter of hours. And both, in the years since, have been engaged in the hard, neverquite- finished work of rebuilding — not just to restore what they had, but to build something stronger.

Their experiences carry lessons for every utility in the Valley.

The First Hours: Safety Before Everything 

When disaster strikes at this scale, the instinct is to start fixing things immediately. Both Marty Ivy, General Superintendent at MEWS, and Lee Brown will tell you that’s exactly the wrong instinct. Ivy’s first move after the tornado wasn’t to assess the substation or count downed poles. It was to account for every MEWS employee, including the lineman in that vault, and find safe, warm housing for his staff and their families. One hundred hotel rooms were booked in a neighboring community. “The most important advice I could give anyone,” Ivy said, “is to make sure the first thing on your list is taking care of your employees and their families. It’s hard for anyone to work in such a dangerous environment without their minds totally focused on the job.”

That close call reshaped Ivy’s thinking about worker safety permanently. In the rebuilding process, MEWS has built dedicated safe spaces into every facility across the city. “In an event like an EF4, time is of the essence in life safety,” he said. “No employee should ever have far to go to be safe. Protection of human life should always be your primary focus. If you practice that, your response times won’t suffer. They’ll actually improve, because everyone is well trained.”

Brown faced a different kind of weight. Two Erwin Utilities employees had family members working in the Riverview Industrial Park when the floodwaters surged. The water rose so fast people couldn’t drive out. Five workers at one business in the park did not make it out. Brown spoke about those losses at a community meeting at the high school.

“That was the hardest part,” he said. “When you’re in a community, and you know people who have lost family members. But you have to put yourself in the frame of mind that it is your mission, even your ministry, to get your services restored. Nobody can begin to think about returning to any degree of normalcy until you do.”

Erwin also learned early that keeping crews rested wasn’t optional. Workers were logging 17 to 20 days straight. Brown’s team eventually adjusted schedules, not because the work wasn’t urgent, but because exhausted workers in dangerous conditions are an accident waiting to happen. Six months later, they conducted a formal stress survey of all employees. “Our employees’ physical and mental health were one of our top priorities,” Brown said. “We made sure everyone knew about our Employee Assistance Program if they needed to talk to someone.”

When Your Neighbors Show Up

Neither utility could have recovered without mutual aid, and both will tell you that relationships built before a disaster are what matter most when it arrives. At Mayfield, Ivy reached out to TVPPA and the Kentucky Utility Authority within hours of the tornado. Neighboring West Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative allowed Mayfield to connect to their undamaged substation directly across the road, keeping the hospital and part of the city running while the broader recovery got underway.

In Erwin, TVPPA’s Caleb Hall and TMEPA’s Brian Solsbee coordinated mutual aid logistics every day until all needs were met. By September 29 — just two days after the flood — 29 additional linemen were on the ground. “One lesson learned many years ago is to call for help early,” Brown said.

When Bumpus Cove was completely cut off, with the only road in or out gone, poles gone, and no path to restore power, Brown called Jeff Dykes, CEO at BrightRidge, and asked if they could extend a three-phase line to connect. “By the time we got the poles set, they were ready to provide power to us,” Brown said. “We never could have done that without good neighbors. I’m so happy to be in an industry where everybody has the mentality to help. We say up here among the northeast local power companies: if I’ve got it, you’ve got it.”

Service Beyond the Meter

In both communities, the response extended far beyond getting the lights back on.

Within the first few days at Erwin, once the GIS team had cataloged the damaged and destroyed homes, the customer service team began calling every affected customer, not to discuss bills or timelines, but simply to listen. They connected customers with FEMA assistance and helped schedule appointments with Samaritan’s Purse, which gave every customer who met with them $1,000 in grocery gift cards. Then, Erwin’s customer service team called back weeks later to check in again. Over 100 customers were contacted multiple times. Erwin also suspended penalties and cutoffs for a month, and their Good Samaritan fund covered the final bills for customers whose homes had been destroyed.

“I used to think our organization was too small to do a lot of things,” Brown said. “And then I wised up and understood: we’re just the right size to do most anything we want to do. For a large utility, what we did might be something you could never put together. But for us and our community, it was fantastic.”

At MEWS, Customer Service Manager Megan Arnold coordinated twice-daily updates at Emergency Operations Center meetings. Finance managers Kelly Green and Kristie McAdoo managed housing and meals for more than 250 mutual aid workers. Someone — no one ever found out who — started an Amazon wish list of snacks and supplies for line crews, and deliveries arrived every day for weeks. “We didn’t think about the idea of roles,” Arnold said. “Everyone jumped in and did what needed to be done.”

Building It Back Stronger 

Mayfield had most customers reconnected within 7 to 10 days; Erwin restored power to 99% of reconnectable customers by October 8. Once the immediate crises were behind them, both utilities turned to a harder, slower question: “How do we make sure this never happens like this again?”

For MEWS, the answer has been systematic. Every facility being rebuilt is being constructed to essential services standards, meaning they’re designed to last 75 to 100 years, with reinforced concrete walls around control centers, protected backup diesel generators, and hardened crew rooms. Safe rooms are now built into every facility across the city, a direct response to that night when one lineman’s survival came down to finding a vault in time. Steel poles and additional underground lines are being incorporated into the grid. Walls are going up around both primary substations. The tornado also taught Ivy a hard lesson about backup generation: natural gas lines were knocked out across the city and took months to restore. “For us, diesel is the best option because it’s readily available in nearby communities,” he said. “During the storm, natural gas was easily damaged. That was a real lesson.”

In Erwin, hardening decisions were shaped by what the flood literally destroyed and what held. Ductile iron poles now stand in the Riverview Industrial Park, set five feet deeper than before and backfilled with concrete. Forty-eight-inch pipe sleeves were installed in the roadbed so that future pole replacements can be made in complete stone backfill. Restrained joint ductile iron pipe replaced PVC throughout the park.

Helene also exposed a communications vulnerability neither Brown nor his team had fully anticipated. Cell service failed. Radios were limited. Reaching crews in remote areas like Bumpus Cove was nearly impossible in the first hours. Erwin has since equipped multiple trucks with Starlink satellite mounts, which the utility now uses daily.

“Prepare for communications without cellphones, radios, and internet,” Brown said simply. “Keep Starlinks readily available.” Erwin crews also used drones and whitewater paddlers to access unreachable damaged areas, and built a temporary microgrid in Bumpus Cove to restore power while permanent repairs were underway.

The Work Continues

More than four years after the tornado, MEWS still has work ahead. About 250 customers remain disconnected because their homes or businesses haven’t been rebuilt. The new headquarters — a $13.3 million project that will incorporate the original building’s historic TVA Power marquee into the new lobby — is in progress, along with new facilities for the water warehouse, electric warehouse, internet warehouse, and wastewater complex, each built to essential services standards.

Erwin Utilities, just 17 months out from Helene, has made remarkable progress. Permanent water and sewer lines now cross the Jackson Love Bridge. The Industrial Park’s electric infrastructure was fully rebuilt with hardened poles by July 2025. The wastewater treatment lab reopened in October 2025. Fiber was restored to all reconnectable locations within 24 days of the flood.

And in Bumpus Cove, there’s a 93-year-old woman who refused to relocate unless she could keep her Erwin Fiber. “She said, ‘When I find something good like Erwin Fiber, I stick with it. I’m not going back to that old phone company,’” Brown recalled. “Service is at the heart of everything we do. And when something like this happens, we’re here for you.”

Marty Ivy was asked what keeps him up at night now, four years on.

“Every time it gets stormy, it’s hard to rest until the storm passes,” he said. “It’s just a different feeling I cannot explain until you live through such an event.”

That feeling, the knowledge of what can happen, and the commitment to keep building anyway are perhaps the most honest things either man could offer to those who haven’t yet faced what they’ve faced. The storms will come. The question is what you’ve built before they arrive, and how quickly you can get back to serving the people counting on you after they hit.