Country Star Compares Nashville Power Outage Fiasco To California’s Awful Wildfire Response

As thousands of Nashville residents in Davidson County remain in the cold and dark without power as single-digit temperatures fast approach this weekend, many, including country star John Rich, are now wondering what went wrong. Friday will be day six without power for 71,000 Nashville Electric Service (NES) customers after Winter Storm Fern.

The singer, who cofounded the duo Big & Rich, said what’s happening in Nashville is “very California.”

“This is incompetence on a level kind of like what you saw in California when they didn’t have enough water to put out the fires,” Rich said on Fox News Friday morning.

California had fire hydrants running dry during the devastating wildfires in 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported. For many, that failure fell squarely on California leadership.

NES CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin said last August she was focused on saving Nashville’s tree “canopy” instead of trimming trees that were too close to power lines. Yet another example of leadership failure as Davidson County continues to have the highest power outages in the state.

RELATED: Nashville Electric CEO Touted Tree-Hugging Over Aggressive Trimming Months Before Massive Ice Storm

Rich made it clear during his interview that he is thankful to the lineman working to help restore power. His anger is directed at Nashville’s Democratic mayor, Freddie O’Connell.

“We have a mayor here in Nashville, a hard-core leftist guy, and they’ve decided that they aren’t going to do any interviews or press conferences through the weekend as the temperatures go down to four and five degrees,” Rich said.

“I’ve just reminded a lot of my Democrat friends … I said, well, ‘You get what you vote for here in Nashville. Maybe next time you put some people in office who actually think ahead.'”

NES said Friday morning that more than 1,000 linemen are working to restore power for more than 70,000 households still in the cold and dark. To put it in perspective, Duke Energy deployed 18,000 crew members to respond to power outages in North Carolina, bringing in linemen from as far as Canada.

An anonymous member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union told Fox 17 in Nashville that, at a minimum, NES should have 2,000 crew members working to restore power.

NES was pressed on Thursday about the number of linemen working while other cities with fewer outages have larger crews.

“This storm is different,” NES Executive Vice President Brent Baker said. “This ice storm is significant. This is the most people NES has ever onboarded onto the system. This storm was bigger than what was even expected … Nashville was slammed. Poles were broken like toothpicks. Trees exploded, landing on top of our infrastructure, on top of the wires.”

The Daily Wire has reached out to NES for an estimate of when power will be restored.