A large tree came down across Lamar Avenue in Memphis around 2:30 p.m. Friday, striking two houses and a power line before blocking much of the roadway near Glenview. Police said no injuries were reported, and it was not immediately established whether the fallen tree caused the power outage that left several hundred people in the surrounding area without electricity.
The tree fell in the 2000 block of Lamar Avenue, near the Glenview neighborhood, according to WREG, which reported that police confirmed the tree struck houses and a utility line before crashing into the roadway. The station's report, credited to photojournalist Chris Newell, showed the scale of the debris blocking the corridor. That stretch of Lamar sits along the edge of the Glenview Historic District, a suburban neighborhood established in 1908 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 for its Craftsman bungalows and Colonial Revival homes, according to Memphis Heritage Inc.
Lamar Avenue, also known as U.S. Route 78 or State Route 4, is no ordinary residential street. It carries up to 35,000 heavy commercial trucks a day toward Memphis International Airport and the BNSF intermodal railyard, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation, which has secured $71 million in federal grant funding for a multi-segment widening project along the corridor set for completion by 2028. A tree blocking the roadway, even briefly, ripples through regional freight movement on one of the city's busiest commercial arteries.
A Corridor Already Under Scrutiny
The 2000 block's troubles aren't new to local safety officials. Lamar Avenue is included on the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization's High Injury Network due to its elevated rate of severe collisions, a designation that helped the city secure a $13.1 million federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant in November 2024, as Hoodline previously reported on a crash near Lamar and Central. The mix of heavy freight traffic and residential streets makes the corridor one of the city's higher-risk thoroughfares even without a downed tree in the mix.
Friday's incident also lands in a summer already marked by repeated tree-related power failures across Shelby County. On August 22, a severe bow echo storm system swept through the region with wind gusts reaching 80 mph, leaving more than 118,000 MLGW customers without power and forcing Memphis-Shelby County Schools to close more than 40 facilities, Hoodline reported at the time in its coverage of the outage that hit 120,000 MLGW customers. Just days later, a separate outage knocked out power to 6,000 customers in Collierville.
Why Memphis Trees Keep Falling on Power Lines
According to Memphis Light, Gas and Water, tree-related issues account for roughly 60 percent of power outages in Shelby County outside of severe weather events. Climate data compiled by MemphisWeather.Net shows August 2026 was the fifth hottest August on record in Memphis, which left soil dry and stressed before the August 22 storm's high winds hit already weakened trees and power infrastructure.
MLGW has been working to get ahead of the problem. Under its three-year Roadmap to Reliability vegetation management plan launched in September 2023, contracted crews had cleared 4,220 miles of line by January 2026, cutting customer outage minutes in half compared to 2023 levels. The utility contracts three vegetation management firms — Kendall Vegetation Services, Lewis Tree Service and ABC Professional Tree Services — an expansion funded in part by a 12 percent electric rate increase the Memphis City Council approved in December 2023 that grew MLGW's active contractor crews from 52 to 90.
What Homeowners Face Next
Whether the tree fell from public or private property will matter for the two households whose houses were struck. Under Tennessee common law, damage from a healthy tree falling during a storm is generally treated as an Act of God, meaning the property that receives the damage is responsible for its own insurance claim unless the tree's owner had prior written notice that it was dead or hazardous, according to The Good Tree Company.
If the fallen tree damaged either home's exterior weatherhead or meter center, MLGW safety guidelines require the homeowner to hire a licensed electrician to complete repairs and pass a code inspection before the utility can legally restore power, since MLGW maintains the main line while building-attached equipment remains the property owner's responsibility. Separately, City of Memphis 311 procedures specify that Public Works crews clear trees blocking public streets and sidewalks, while private property owners remain responsible for trees that fall on private land without touching active utility lines — a process that can take up to 28 days during high-volume periods.
