Chattanooga, Tennessee, July 2012: A powerful storm thundered toward the city, darkening the summer-blue skies and then snapping branches, rattling power lines, and bending old willow trees toward the ground.
Warning alarms chimed inside the control room of the regional power company as the storm hit. Soon, the clamor of beeping alerts was constant as system maps flickered red and green with downed wires, blown circuits, and lights going out all across the city.
Just three months before the big storm hit in Chattanooga, Tennessee, EPB technicians connected high-voltage electric wires to a smart switch that would help EPB reduce power outage durations by 40 percent.
And then the system began to restore itself, sensing where the breaks were and automatically flipping switches to isolate them and reroute power back into homes. Nearly 80,000 customers lost power that evening; the power company, EPB, estimates that half of them got it back within a second or two.
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