A round of severe thunderstorms knocked out power to roughly 800 customers in Maryville on Thursday night, and by late evening city crews had already restored service to all but about 250 residents. The outage was tied directly to storm damage, according to the city, as work continued into the night to finish the repairs.
The City of Maryville posted the update Thursday night, confirming that crews were actively working to address the outage after storm damage hit local lines. The disruption came as the National Weather Service in Morristown issued alerts for Blount County and surrounding East Tennessee counties, warning of thunderstorms capable of producing wind gusts of 50 to 60 mph, strong enough to snap tree limbs and take down power lines, according to WeatherBug.
Anyone still without power was directed to call the city's automated outage line at 865-983-8722, which lets customers report an interruption using their phone number, meter number, or billing location number. The system cross-references customer records and feeds an online outage map once field crews confirm conditions on the ground, per the city's own outage-reporting guidance.
A Utility Built to Handle Regular Storm Hits
Maryville Electric Department serves more than 20,000 customers, including about 17,000 residential accounts and 3,000 commercial and industrial accounts, spread across 387 miles of distribution lines in Maryville, Rockford, and the surrounding parts of Blount County. The department operates and maintains seven substations that draw wholesale power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplies electricity but does not generate it locally, functioning purely as a distributor for the region.
The timing of Thursday's outage lines up with a broader pattern this summer. On August 6, a lightning strike knocked out power in parts of Maryville along Morganton Road and Partnership Park South, with crews restoring service within an hour, according to a report from Smokies Live. Weeks earlier, on July 21, the utility ran a planned 30-minute outage on Scenic Drive and nearby neighborhoods to complete fusing upgrades meant to improve system reliability.
Newer Operations Hub Coordinates the Response
Crews dispatching repairs after Thursday's storm are now working out of a newly built Operations Center at 332 Home Avenue, which the Electric Department moved into in June after a project that broke ground back in March 2025. The facility consolidated utility staff, maintenance operations, and fleet management into a single updated complex.
On paper, Maryville's grid runs efficiently. 2024 data compiled by FindEnergy shows the department posted an annual distribution energy loss rate of 1.84%, better than both the Tennessee state average of 2.01% and the national average of 2.43%, ranking it 9th best among 84 tracked Tennessee providers for grid efficiency. Still, like most utilities running overhead lines through wooded terrain, Maryville's system remains exposed to the kind of wind and falling timber that summer thunderstorms routinely bring.
Blount County's power picture is more complicated than a single utility, since coverage is split among six providers, including Maryville Electric, Alcoa Utilities, Fort Loudoun Electric Cooperative, Lenoir City Utilities Board, and Knoxville Utilities Board, each serving different pockets of the county, per FindEnergy. That patchwork means storm damage in one part of the county can hit multiple grids differently depending on which utility maintains the lines in a given neighborhood.
As of the city's Thursday night update, repairs were ongoing for the roughly 250 customers still without power, with crews continuing to work the storm damage into the evening.
