This story is a partnership between the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene. The Nashville Banner is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on civic news. Visit nashvillebanner.com for more information.
The rumors began circulating Tuesday night. While slices of the rest of Nashville were getting power back, Belle Meade, one of the city’s wealthiest areas, remained in the dark.
Fourteen of the neighborhood’s roads were blocked off by trees, their branches weighed down by frozen rain. Maybe 10 percent of traffic lights worked, on streets that are normally so regulated that you can get a ticket for driving in the left lane if you aren’t passing or turning. All calls to city hall are currently getting routed through an emergency phone system.
And then there were the sewers — surely the detail that provoked the greatest curiosity among the rest of Nashville. The Belle Meade sewers use grinder pumps that require power to operate. If you were running water, flushing the toilets or even dripping your faucets, you’d fill up tanks and back up your system pretty quickly.
“We’re not really worried about the [grinder pump system] freezing,” Belle Meade Mayor Rusty Moore tells the Nashville Banner, “as much as we’re worried about people dripping their faucets, because the grinder pumps are not pumping the sewer. So it’s just filling up their tanks, and it doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
Nashville leaders encourage citizens to seek warm shelter as emergency response continues
Many people in Belle Meade have home generators, but not all generators are created equal. This divide has created two groups of Belle Meade residents: those with whole-home generators connected to their sewer system who can flush their toilets indefinitely, and those with portable generators who cannot. Some residents have left for hotels or to stay with family.
The sewers aren’t a problem, Moore says — at least not yet. But they could become one the longer this continues.
Moore, who has a smaller generator, is camping out at his house. The rest of his family has gone. In a widely circulated email, a neighborhood emergency committee says it might be two weeks before Belle Meade, one of the city’s lower-density areas, gets power; Moore tells the Banner that no one knows how long it will be, but no one from Metro or NES has told them two weeks.
“We aren’t optimistic about getting it this week for sure,” Moore wrote in a separate message to residents. “NES is concentrating on areas that are more dense where more customers can be restored.”
“We have no information from NES,” Belle Meade Commissioner Neal Clayton tells the Banner. “We don’t know if it’s a day, a couple days, a week.”
“It may be advisable to find alternate lodging,” Moore’s message continued, relaying a message from the emergency committee.
Clayton’s family owns a portable generator. “We’ve elected to stay,” he says. “So far, it hasn’t really been bad.”
An official city update stated that door-to-door solicitors have descended upon Belle Meade, selling roof repairs and tree removal, looking to pocket marked-up down payments and then run off with the cash. Despite rumors on Facebook that looters were prowling to take advantage of empty homes and powered-down alarm systems, Moore emphasizes that there has been no looting.
Amid the storm, some Nashvillians have derived a bit of glee from Belle Meade’s predicament.
“Dear Belle Meade,” wrote Jen Silver, who lives in a condo in Green Hills, in a Facebook post that has garnered several dozen likes and comments, “wait your turn and stop bitching.”
“Now, either shut up, post something neighborly that does not display your massive entitlement, ask who needs help or maybe you just post something funny. We are all in this together.”
Rumors and AI have been major players in the aftermath of Winter Storm Fern. People without power, taking breaks from their freezing homes to charge their phones in their cars, have been scrolling social media, hearing rumors about NES and union linemen from a potentially dubious X account, and becoming even angrier. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers put out a statement denying what everyone had heard.
Online lineman rumor and AI imagery have further confused residents during weather emergency
Tuesday, an anonymous poster in a Belle Meade neighborhood Facebook group wrote that they were “pretty frustrated” with how Metro was handling the storm.
“We pay a lot of money in property taxes,” they wrote. “I’m sick to the back teeth of hearing how expensive it is to bury the power lines.” The post then shared two questionable claims — that property taxes have doubled and that hotels are completely booked (although many locals are staying in hotels) — as well as appreciation for the workers freezing on the lines.
“To the leaders of the City of Nashville,” the post concludes, “it is time to wake up, put your big boy pants on, and act like a serious big city who puts the safety of its citizens first! (This is what happens when you have a lot of time to think and shiver).”
This anonymous post — and Silver’s response — drew reactions in part because they tapped into something deep-seated in Nashville: the intersection of class warfare, decades-old resentments and people eager to throw Belle Meade’s perceived exceptionalism back in its face.
This post, if written by someone in the neighborhood, may be emblematic of a certain type of Belle Meade resident. But no neighborhood is a monolith, and those who spoke to the Banner expressed different opinions.
Bill Decker lives about a block from the Belle Meade Country Club. He has a full-home generator because his wife has a disability, and they need power to run their elevator.
“We have some neighbors staying with us until this passes,” Decker says. “I think a lot of people have given up and abandoned their homes. It seems pretty quiet out there.”
When asked about rumors of Belle Meade residents wanting power first, if he’d seen that sort of sentiment, he says, “I’d say I’ve seen the opposite.”
“Sure, everyone wants power at their house first. But you know, these people that are out there doing this work, they’re the heroes. And it makes sense to me that you got to restore where you can protect the most lives.
“And if you’ve got a chance of putting a block together with 400 people living in it or a block with 40 people living in it, that’s a pretty easy decision for authorities to make, I would say.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
