Nashville’s ice storm didn’t just knock out power, it knocked out the basic routines people rely on to stay safe, and both Brendan Tierney of WSMV 4 and Hannah McDonald of NewsChannel 5 describe a city where ordinary households suddenly found themselves making emergency decisions that usually belong in hurricane zones or blizzard states.
Tierney’s reporting starts in the place many families end up during a long outage: doing whatever they can to keep pipes from freezing and bodies from going numb, from running faucets to burning through candles like it’s 1890, except with the very modern fear that the house could slip into dangerously low temperatures overnight.
McDonald zooms out even further and shows what happens when the cold lingers and power doesn’t come back quickly – hundreds of thousands of people stop sleeping at home altogether, not because they want a change of scenery, but because the math turns brutal when you’ve got no heat, no reliable cooking, and in some cases not even water…