NES Faces the Fallout of Extended Power Outages Lisa Boyle remembers the trees cracking on Sunday morning. “We had so many trees fall, and I was getting scared of that too, because we kept hearing them,” Boyle tells the Scene. “We lost power Sunday and spent one night freezing our butts off under a million blankets, sleeping in our coats. It was Monday when we finally left around 6:30 in the evening. At 3 o’clock in the morning, I got the call.” For the second time in 13 months, Boyle’s house was on fire. “The reason I got the call is that I’ve become so friendly with my neighbors — they were able to alert me,” explains Boyle, who recently moved back to Nashville from Los Angeles. The Boyle family lost their home in the Pacific Palisades fire that tore through a residential section of the Californian coast in January of last year. Boyle had been in her new Forest Hills home for a few weeks when Winter Storm Fern— or as she calls it, the Great Freeze — swept across Davidson County. After losing power on Sunday, Jan. 25, alongside more than 200,000 Nashville households, she and her son lit the home’s fireplaces for the first time since moving in. They snuffed out the fireplace before leaving for a hotel, but a trapped ember stayed lit somewhere near the roof. The house burned from the top down. Winter Storm 2026 Our coverage of January's severe ice storm “The first time I lost my house in California, our whole community lost their homes together — it was painful, but it was a shared pain,” Boyle tells the Scene two weeks after losing her second house. “This is much more selective. But I did learn that I sure picked the right place to be. Even before the fire, my neighbors reached out in ways that I hadn’t experienced before — it was refreshing to get back here and to feel that neighborly love.#nashville_electric_service #lisa_boyle #winter_storm_fern #phillip_jones #bill_frist
