Dry tree limbs and wind aren’t a good combination.
While Monday evening’s storm wasn’t severe, the effects of the continuing drought left electric some customers without power throughout the Golden Triangle.
“We had 59 total outages, affecting 3,716 customers,” said Jon Turner of 4-County Electric Power Association. “It wasn’t really that bad of a storm, but with everything so dry, when those winds kicked in, you had a lot of brittle tree limbs coming down.”
Turner said the outages were distributed throughout 4-County’s service area — which includes rural parts of Lowndes, Oktibbeha, Clay and Noxubee counties — and not concentrated in any particular area.
“We had several outages in Noxubee County and Lowndes County,” Turner said. “Probably more people were affected in Oktibbeha County than anywhere else, but it was pretty spread out.”
Turner said all power had been restored by early this morning.
Todd Gale, general manager for Columbus Light and Water, reported comparable outages.
“We had sporadic outages, mostly tree limbs falling on lines,” Gale said. “We had power restored by about 8:30 last night. It wasn’t very bad at all.”
There were 69 outages reported in the city.
Terry Kemp said there were a few outages in Starkville, as well, including what he called a “major” outage on Highway 12.
“Everybody was back in service within an hour to an hour-and-a-half, though, so it wasn’t too bad,” said Kemp, general manager of Starkville Utilities Department. I think there were six to 10 businesses on Highway 12 that were affected, along with a couple of small communities in the north part of town.”
Kemp said the utility’s tree-trimming maintenance program probably reduced the number of outages.
“That really does help,” he said.
Tonight’s forecast may produce outages, too. The National Weather Service in Jackson forecasts severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes.
“We’re all gassed up and ready to go,” Turner said.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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