Nashville is furious about power outages. Republicans say 'woke' is to blame. [View all]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-furious-power-outages-republicans-say-woke-blame-rcna257338


As Nashville’s utility company struggled to recover from a catastrophic ice storm and its Democratic mayor ordered a review, some conservatives attacked diversity training.

Sen Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is running for governor, alleged on X that the utility company “was so focused on woke policies and DEI that it failed at its most basic responsibility: keeping the power on.”

Tennessee’s Republican House speaker, Cameron Sexton, called for an overhaul of the utility on Facebook and said the General Assembly would pursue accountability. The utility’s “pro-tree canopy policy” and focus on DEI, among other issues, require “executive management to be fired and the board to be replaced,” he wrote.

The utility’s CEO, Teresa Broyles-Aplin, said this week that workers are doing the best they can to respond to the largest storm and outage in the company’s history.

“Accountability is important,” she said at a news conference Tuesday. “Right now, we are in active recovery. We have plenty of time to do after-action review and evaluate things we could have done better.”