Southeastern KY power outages drag on as ‘dangerously’ frigid temperatures close in
A fresh blanket of snow across most of South Central and Eastern Kentucky Monday morning complicated efforts to restore power for the more than 38,000 customers still in the dark after the weekend’s wintry weather, but thousands of Kentuckians have been brought back online.
Conditions along the Tennessee-Kentucky border Saturday night into Sunday morning included just-near-freezing temperatures and contributed to significant ice accumulation on power lines and trees across most of the commonwealth’s southernmost counties.
Now, the arctic air mass that had settled across the rest of the state has moved southeast into Kentucky’s mountainous Appalachian region, bringing with it dangerously cold temperatures and breezy conditions that will make line repairs and tree removal efforts more difficult and hazardous, local officials told the Herald-Leader Monday.
“As they’re fixing stuff, more stuff keeps breaking,” McCreary County Emergency Management Director Stephen McKinney said.
Pulaski County was hardest-hit by Winter Storm Fern’s ice and freezing rain accumulation. About 8,000 customers were without power early Monday morning, but crews had successfully reconnected thousands of residents by early afternoon. Now, Allen County, southeast of Bowling Green, tops the state’s list of areas without power. Downed power lines and trees have stranded nearly half of the county’s residents.
Judge-Executive Dennis Harper took to Facebook early Monday morning to offer help loading firewood and propane tanks for county residents with secondary sources of heat. The area’s high was not expected to break 15 degrees.
The county opened a second warming shelter up late Monday morning because the Victory Hill Dream Center was well over capacity. Shelter director Amy Payne said the center was prepared to house as many residents as it could as long as the power remained on at its Scottsville location.
Somerset’s South Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative Corp. has lost connection to about 20% of its service area, according to the co-op’s digital outage map. Tri-County Electric Membership Corp., which serves border region the area south of Bowling Green, was also reporting a 20% outage area.
Allen, Clay, Monroe and McCreary counties have the most widespread outages.
McCreary County’s two warming centers are playing host to a nursing home that was knocked offline over the weekend and dozens of families without secondary heat sources, McKinney said.
Meanwhile, emergency medical personnel and fire crews are hard at work on calls to provide emergency dialysis treatment to patients with kidney disease and reconnect people who are oxygen dependent.
“Basically, things are running at-capacity right now,” he said.
About a quarter of Clay County residents are reportedly without power, and the county is transitioning its warming center into an emergency management shelter Monday.
Assistant Emergency Managment Director Revelle Berry told the Herald-Leader the department has not had to facilitate any major rescues and the warming center is still being under-utilized. Residents appear to have prepared well for the storm, she said, but officials remain committed to seeing the county through the remaining power outages.
“As you drive around here, you can see the lines sagging and the ice on trees,” Berry said. “It’s a dangerous situation.”
South Kentucky RECC has requested mutual aid from in state and as far away as Illinois to mobilize additional crews to repair downed poles and clear limbs from equipment.
So far, crews across Kentucky have restored power to about 35,000 customers, down from a high Sunday of nearly 75,000 outages. Across the state, snow, sleet and ice has fallen somewhere to some degree for 36 hours straight, Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday. While the precipitation is expected to ease by this afternoon, the cold temperatures and hazardous driving conditions still pose a threat.
“With these dangerously cold temperatures, if your power is out, we need you to get to a warming center,” the governor said.
A total of 137 warming centers have been set up across the commonwealth. They are listed at kyem.ky.gov, alongside additional winter-weather resources.
Eleven state resort park lodges and conference centers have been converted to temporary warming centers, the governor’s office reported Monday.
Kentucky’s electric grid operator PJM Interconnection was forecasting a record high load Tuesday, introducing the possibility of controlled rolling blackouts across its 13-state service region, according to alerts the company issued late last week. The service provider did take the unusual step of procuring additional natural gas-generated supply through the rest of January to meet the higher demand, according to Bloomberg News.
Although overnight temperatures across much of Kentucky could be deadly, there is one slight positive to the persistent frost that is expected to continue for most of the week. Pike County emergency management director Nee Jackson said the below-freezing temps should keep the region’s high-altitude snow melt in check.
“A lot of this water is going to have time to run down and run off before, you know, we start to get into any trouble,” Jackson said.
Some streams in Kentucky’s easternmost Big Sandy River watershed were nearing the crest of their banks Monday afternoon, but the drainage basin appeared to have peaked around midnight and leveled off around low- to moderate-flow, according to a Herald-Leader analysis of U.S. Geological Survey monitoring station data.
“We’re not out of the woods,” Jackson said. “But things are looking OK right now.”
This story was originally published January 26, 2026 at 11:17 AM.
