Starkville Electric Department workers scrambled into action Monday to restore electricity after an afternoon storm knocked off power for about 50 percent of its customers, SED General Manager Terry Kemp said.
A line of storms producing torrential rain, damaging winds and small hail moved through Oktibbeha County about 5 p.m., and residents took to social media to report individual instances of downed trees, roof damage and flooding streets throughout the evening.
No injuries directly caused by the storm were reported as of Tuesday morning, emergency management officials said.
A majority of Starkville’s main electric circuits were impacted one way or another in the storm, Kemp said, leaving a large portion of the city without power.
Several key transmission poles were physically knocked down, and Kemp reported “severe damage to transmission circuits” shortly after the storm passed.
Most Highway 12 storefronts were without power, and motorists were left with daunting intersection-crossing attempts without the guidance of street lights.
A large swath of the thoroughfare — from Penn’s Restaurant’s Avenue of Patriots location to CVS, located at the Montgomery Street intersection — was without electricity and street lights as the sun set.
Starkville’s downtown corridor also saw minor damage as winds peeled back a portion of Denim and Lace’s front rooftop exterior and tore off tracts of running lights from the tops of buildings near Old Venice Pizza Company.
Adding to residents’ frustration was the fact that SED’s phone lines went down as the severe weather knocked out portions of Starkville’s electric infrastructure. Customers were unable to report power outages, so they began tweeting at SED’s Twitter account — @SED_Utilities — and continued doing so through the night.
About 9 p.m., SED tweeted that a majority of Starkville was again with electricity, but isolated neighborhoods and other pockets of town were still without power.
“Our focus is to get substations and transmission back up and running as soon as possible. We’re making good progress as most are online now,” Kemp said about 9 p.m.
Workers continued making repairs through the night to resolve issues with SED’s infrastructure, but some customers were still without power this morning.
Two Starkville School District campuses — Starkville High School and Emerson Family School — suffered damage during the storm. The district announced SHS would not open due to continued power outages, while Emerson would operate as normal since classroom areas were not damaged during last night’s event.
“We still have a lot of tree limbs and power lines down this morning, and there are a lot of people from different agencies working to correct those problems,” said Jim Britt, Oktibbeha County Emergency Management Agency director.
Officials are still awaiting direction on how to classify yesterday’s storm. Britt said the National Weather Service described the event simply as a severe thunderstorm, but a NWS meteorologist told The Associated Press yesterday it could have been a microburst.
“This really should be a wakeup call. We put out a lot of alerts yesterday; hopefully people heeded them and their importance,” Britt said. “(Storm response) shows a good effort on all of our people — emergency responders, utility companies and so on — to work together.”
Other Mississippi cities and towns also suffered damage yesterday. Lowndes County Emergency Manager Cindy Lawrence told the AP at least three trees fell on houses in and around Columbus, while winds ripped off a Greenville warehouse’s roof as the storm moved across the Mississippi River earlier in the day.
Carl Smith covers Starkville and Oktibbeha County for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @StarkDispatch
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