Walker demands outage plan

Prolonged electrical outages in Marshall County have left vulnerable residents stranded without water, air conditioning and refrigerated food, prompting District 2 Supervisor Johnny Walker of Red Banks to issue a fiery call for emergency contingency planning during a board meeting on Sept. 8.

Walker detailed the severe toll of three major utility failures over the past 18 months under the Holly Springs Utility Department, noting that parts of his district recently went seven to nine consecutive days without power. In rural pockets where homes rely on electric well pumps, blackouts cut off both electricity and running water.

“When you go up and you see these elderly people that have no lights, they have no generator – if they had a generator they wouldn’t know how to crank it, if they had a generator they couldn’t pour fuel in it – we got a problem,” Walker said.

Walker told the board he spent three days delivering two pallets of bottled water door to door across his district. During one stop, he encountered an elderly woman using a walker who was dragging spoiled groceries from her nonworking refrigerator out to roadside trash cans in triple-digit heat.

Other board members shared accounts of residents struggling through the outages, including an oxygen-dependent, double-amputee resident whose family felt helpless as home temperatures climbed, and constituents considering moves out of Marshall County due to unreliable service. Supervisors also noted widespread daily disruptions in areas such as Lakeshore, where service routinely drops in the afternoon and stays off into the night.

The discussion briefly drew an interruption from the gallery, where an attendee voiced frustration over electrical transformers before board officials noted that public remarks were restricted to scheduled agenda items.

Because the utility operates independently under the City of Holly Springs, county supervisors have no direct governance over the department’s grid or infrastructure repairs. Walker urged the board to coordinate with the county’s emergency management agency to establish a dedicated response framework, including centralized water storage and rapid-distribution vehicles during prolonged outages.

“We can’t keep kicking this down the road,” Walker said. “We got to put our heads together in some kind of way to do something.”