08/23/2026
A Bow Echo storm system impacted Memphis and Shelby County in the evening hours. These storms can produce severe straight-line winds between 80-100mph, heavy rains and occasional tornados. While we have no confirmation of tornadic activity, we have confirmation of straight-line wind speeds more than 70mph. These winds have wreaked havoc on our electric system impacting more than 25% of MLGW customers.
We are still doing assessment to understand the extent of damage, but from what we know now, our customers should expect this to be a multi-day recovery, with the majority of customers expected to be restored by Thursday evening based on early assessments.
Affected customer should make plans for being without power for multiple days. We will work with local agencies to provide information where assistance can be found for those that need it.
Our immediate priorities are restoring power to hospitals, water treatment, and sewer facilities. Following that we will prioritize circuit restorations that will have the largest number of customers impacted. For the school systems, we will endeavor to have a better assessment on Sunday afternoon about the status of individual schools and when they might expect to be restored. It is fair to say that there will be disruptions to normal operations next week for some number of the schools that have been impacted.
Tonight, we have the MLGW team and tree trimming crews already at work assessing damage and restoring power where they can. They will be joined additional MLGW staff and by more than 30 contractor crews who are headed our way, with more to follow behind them: in short, we have help on the way.
MLGW has an Outage Center on mlgw.com which includes information on reporting and tracking outages as well as a preparedness guide: mlgw.com/StormPrep.
