Marty Ivy – Mayfield Electric & Water System

On the night of December 10, 2021 a violent storm system that included long-track tornados moved across the central United States. A vicious category EF-4 tornado with peak winds of 190 mph began in northwest Tennessee and followed a 128-mile course through Western Kentucky. It devastated the town of Mayfield, home to Mayfield Electric and Water Systems (MEWS).

The storm wreaked havoc in the small city of approximately 10,000 residents, destroying over 400 homes and nearly 140 businesses. The town’s historic square, including the 133-year old Graves County Courthouse and a Methodist church which had just celebrated its centennial, was brutalized by the storm. MEWS faced cataclysmic damage to their entire infrastructure, with some 27 building and or structures either total destroyed or severely damaged. Their operations center was completely destroyed. They lost a substation. And all of the town’s 5360 customers were without power in the dead of winter.

“People’s lives were at stake,” says Marty Ivy, General Superintendent of MEWS. “As soon as we saw the magnitude of the devastation, we called TVPPA immediately that night; their help has been phenomenal. We had been through a similar, smaller crisis when we were hit with a 100-year ice storm in 2009 and TVPPA helped us coordinate mutual aid then, so we knew what we needed to do.

“TVPPA found lineworkers and coordinated the logistics of getting them to our facility and working in our community. They also helped us find  transformers to help rebuild our system. Within three days, our system, which normally has 42 employees, had over 250 people working to help us rebuild and restore power.

“Their help was very important to the citizens of Mayfield. The hospital was without power, the nursing homes…without power, the schools were without power. All the street lights were gone in the center part of town. And people were struggling. And so the more help that we could quickly get into Mayfield, the faster we could get the system rebuilt.

“Remarkably, between our crews and the mutual aid crews, with the help of a neighboring system – West Kentucky Rural Electric who offered for us to attach some of our circuitry to one of their substations – on day five, we got 1,577 customers back online by tying some of our circuitry to WKRECC. And by day eight, we had our substation reenergized and back online with about 56% of our customers on. By Christmas Eve, we had about 80% of our customers on and by the end of December, we had every customer that could be connected, connected to our system and reenergized,” says Ivy.

Ivy said that because of TVPPA’s support, his staff  was able to focus on the  community’s needs.  “We needed help with logistics to make sure that everyone had a place to stay, a place to take a shower, a place to get their clothes washed. When you go from 42 people typically, to over 200 in three days, the logistics part of that is a nightmare.”

The level of cooperation and support required to make such a herculean task possible has been nurtured by the trust relationships TVPPA members have with one another adds Ivy. “Three days after the storm, I turned around in the office there stood Tony Thompson, General Manager of Murray Electric, and he said, ‘We’ve got our system back up. What can I do to help you?’ Mutual aid is very important and the relationships built among public power companies are like a brotherhood…in times of crisis we help each other.”