You could buy gas station chicken tenders at lunchtime Thursday in Nashville, but you couldn’t buy gas.

A power outage affecting both Duke Energy and SCI-REMC customers hit just before noon today. Around 941 Nashville customers of Duke, including all of downtown and its stoplights, and more than 3,000 SCI-REMC customers have been without lights or air conditioning for about two hours so far.

There were also 938 customers out north of Nashville in the Bean Blossom area, said Brown County Emergency Management Agency Director Susan Armstrong.

Many SCI-REMC customers had power restored around 2, but all of Nashville, served by Duke, was still dark. Shopkeepers stood on their porches out of the rain, and traffic moved slowly through intersections marked with portable stop signs.

Readers also reported outages in Morgantown and Trafalgar.

The cause of the outage, affecting a main transmission line, was a tree down, Brown County Emergency Management reported on its Facebook page after speaking with Duke officials.

Around 1:30 p.m., county commissioner Diana Biddle reported that the County Office Building would be closing for the day, as it does not have a power source able to serve the whole building. The jail/sheriff’s department, EMS station, court, probation and clerk’s office were still open on generator power. The COVID clinic at the music center is open until 6. All other county offices are closed. They normally close at 4, so even if power was restored by then, it wouldn’t give them much time to work, Biddle explained.

This story will be updated.

3:45 p.m. UPDATE

For 938 Duke customers north of Nashville (Bean Blossom area) and 941 customers in Nashville, the power restoration estimate is now 10 p.m., Armstrong said. There are 772 customers north toward Morgantown that also have power restored then. Most of those customers are in Morgan County including Morgantown.

Armstrong reported that the tree on the transmission line was affecting SCI-REMC and Duke customers, but REMC had been able to flip almost all their affected customers to other transmission lines and off the Duke lines. The number of Duke customers affected was around 3,000, she said.

9 p.m. UPDATE

Power was restored around 6:15 p.m. for most Duke customers except for about 40 near Gnaw Bone. Restoration time was estimated to be 9:15 p.m. for those still out.