Court filing alleges negligence against power company and three of its workers

The death of an Anderson County man and the brutally cold temperatures that afflicted much of the country at Christmas time 2022 are at the center of a civil suit filed this week in the home county of the late Tony Lee Smith.  As the personal representative of his father’s estate, Scott Smith’s lawsuit alleging negligence seeks a jury trial and an award of at least $100 thousand actual and punitive damages.  According to the plaintiff’s claim, Tony Smith had been diagnosed with chronic lung disease, lived alone, and relied on an electric oxygen concentrator.  The suit alleges that the morning of Christmas Eve 2022, Duke conducted rolling blackouts in Anderson County, but the company and three of its employees “were negligent or grossly negligent in the operations of systems designed to ‘roll’ customers offline from power and then bring them back on line.”  The lawsuit, by Attorney Jennifer Spragins Burnett, quotes a coroner in the news media as saying, “the gentleman’s oxygen concentrator could not run when the power went out, resulting in his death.”