MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Hundreds of thousands of people in Nashville are still waiting for the power to come back on after this week's ice storm. It has left many people to rely on each other for a warm place to stay and a hot meal. Justin Barney at member station WPLN reports.
(CROSSTALK)
JUSTIN BARNEY, BYLINE: In a Kroger parking lot in downtown Nashville, Robert Austin (ph) has been waiting for over an hour in the cold to get a hot meal.
ROBERT AUSTIN: This hasn't been a normal winter for people out here.
BARNEY: He's one of about a hundred people bundled up waiting for a food truck to open, when a blonde woman in big sunglasses shows up.
MELISSA BRUNER: Sir, I'm trying to get open.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
BRUNER: This is a three-hour drive each way for me. Give me just a...
BARNEY: That's Melissa Brewer (ph). She drove here from Madisonville, Kentucky, on ice-covered roads to provide free hot meals with the help of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen. They're here because a lot of restaurants are closed and people can't cook at home.
BRUNER: I couldn't imagine being in this position, cold and hungry and just nowhere to go.
BARNEY: Heat is the biggest issue in Nashville right now. Many residents, myself included, are going on three days straight with no heat. Nighttime temperatures are in the single digits. It's past the stage where you can just stick it out in the cold. In a rare move, Nashville opened up warming shelters across the city from fire stations to police precincts. Hotels are booked up. This has left a lot of people to rely on friends and family. EA Cox (ph) took in her dad.
EA COX: He doesn't have, like, gas heat or even, like, a wood-burning fireplace. There's, like, absolutely no source of heat for him at all. He was planning on just, like, coming and hanging out the first day, and I was like, no, you're definitely spending the night here.
BARNEY: Others have been taken in by friends. Jake Thibodeau (ph) had a tree fall on his house. A layer of ice is still covering trees here, causing branches to continue to damage power lines and homes.
JAKE THIBODEAU: They're just falling over. And I'm talking, like, a hundred-plus-year-old trees ripping from the ground, root ball and everything - not just branches breaking off.
BARNEY: Luckily, a friend had a spot for him and his family because he didn't want to risk his family getting injured.
THIBODEAU: We got three kids, so it was, like, not worth potentially having a tree come crashing down in the middle of the night. Kind of wild, man.
BRUNER: How many's in your group? Four?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Us four.
BARNEY: Finally, Brewer (ph) opens her food stand, serving hot wraps and burgers to those waiting in the cold.
BRUNER: When things like this happens, you need to get out and help people.
BARNEY: And she'll be back tomorrow with more hot meals.
For NPR News, I'm Justin Barney in Nashville. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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