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NES board member and leaders outline reforms after Winter Storm Fern, pledge improved communications
Summary
Nashville Electric Service (NES) leaders and a NES board member told the Transportation Infrastructure Committee they are implementing changes after Winter Storm Fern, including scaled emergency plans, a new chief communications role, improved outage mapping, and data-driven restoration forecasts; council members pressed for quicker, clearer public information and more collaboration.
Nashville Electric Service leaders and a NES board member told the Transportation Infrastructure Committee that the utility is changing how it prepares for and communicates during major storms after Winter Storm Fern, promising a revised emergency response plan, an expanded communications team and more accurate restoration estimates.
Ian Prunny, a NES board member, said the city faced "the biggest ice storm we have ever encountered as a city," and urged closer collaboration with Metro government as NES implements work recommended by an independent PA Consulting review. "If you look at the 20 largest storms we've had in Nashville, 12 have been in the last six years and three have been in 2026," Prunny said, describing the storm as a pressure test for the utility's systems.
Nut graf: Council members used the hearing to press NES on a central criticism from residents: that public information during the storm lagged behind field operations. In response, NES described concrete steps already under way — a hiring process for a chief communications officer and public information officer, enhanced outage-mapping tools and a municipal portal for partner access, aerial damage-assessment flights, and the development of measurable KPIs for storm response and communications.
NES staff said they are rewriting the emergency response plan to make it more prescriptive and scalable. The utility also hired an emergency-response consultant and said each employee now has primary and secondary storm duties and will undergo targeted training. "Our emergency response plan largely tracked industry best practice other than it wasn't scalable enough," NES said.
On communications, NES described a shift from limited outside vendor dependence toward a larger in-house team. The communications hiring is active and slated to go through the board soon; NES told the committee the goal is for the new team to provide consistent, frequent estimated restoration timelines and to reduce the tone-deaf or purely feel-good social posts residents criticized after Fern.
Daniel Johnson, NES vice president of engineering, told the committee that the utility reinstated a hotline and has been layering contact methods (calls, texts, mailers and door-knocks) to reach customers during vegetation-management and outage work. He said the utility has been improving the accuracy of its restoration estimates in recent events.
Council members pressed NES to adopt specific public-facing KPIs (for example, communicating an estimated time of restoration for a large event within a determined window) and to provide clearer, empathetic messages that help residents plan during prolonged outages. NES said those KPIs will be compared to industry best practice and brought to the board for approval.
The committee also heard that NES is investing in data collection (LAR flights and vegetation mapping) to speed damage assessments and to support long-term planning for resilience, including pilot projects to underground distribution in selected locations.
The committee did not take votes. NES leaders said they will report back to the council and the NES board as after-action work and KPIs are finalized.
