Storm brings power outages, but little other damage found
Published 6:00 am Thursday, February 14, 2008
Tuesday’s weather brought power outages, trees down, hail andstrong winds to the Lincoln County area, but authorities said nosubstantial damage or actual tornadoes were reported.
Lincoln County Civil Defense Director Clifford Galey said whilethe county was under a tornado watch from around 9 a.m. to around 4p.m. Tuesday, and then under severe thunderstorm warnings, thecounty came out lucky compared to neighboring areas.
“We had a couple of reports of trees on cars, but nothing majorother than that,” he said.
Meanwhile, there were reports of hail around Brookhaven and inthe Hog Chain and Bogue Chitto areas, Galey said. He said thereports were all of penny-sized hail and smaller.
Local law enforcement officials said they took calls of treesdown and power outages throughout the day, but the weather did notcause them extensive trouble.
Brookhaven Police Assistant Chief Nolan Jones said a tree fellon a house, knocking the meter out at 303 South Fourth St., andthat there were trees and limbs down throughout the city.
In the county there were also trees damaged by the wind andweather, but Lincoln County Sheriff Steve Rushing said all reportshe’d gotten were that Lincoln County dodged the severe weather thatseemed to cause trouble in counties to the north.
“We had a couple of calls of trees down, but we didn’t getanything like what Pearl and Jackson got,” he said.
Meanwhile, local power companies reported extensive outages inLincoln and surrounding counties.
Entergy Customer Account Manager Kenny Goza said from the timewhen the storm peaked Tuesday at 2 p.m. to about 12 hours later,Entergy experienced 12-15 different outages.
“We had around 400 customers out of service,” he said. “We had atotal of 1,000 out in Copiah and Lincoln counties, with most of theoutages being in Copiah County.”
Goza said there are still some customers out in Copiah County,and that outside resources had been brought in to help with thateffort.
Copiah County was also a trouble spot for Southwest Electric,said Engineering Manager Kevin Bonds. He reported around 3,000customers without power system-wide, with around 250 in LincolnCounty and roughly another 750 in Copiah County.
“There are still some small scattered outages where poles werebroken,” he said.
Southwest workers battled the bulk of the outages for around 12hours.
Magnolia Electric was hit the hardest of local power companies,with over half of their meters out at some point during Tuesday’sweather.
Member Services Director Lucy Shell said most of the outageswere caused by weather-related transmission problems and trees thathad fallen on power lines. She said five different substations hadgone out at overlapping times during the afternoon between 12:48and 3:39 p.m.
“But that doesn’t begin to touch it,” she said. “We had right athalf our meters out.”
She said most of the power had been restored to areas in theircoverage area, but that there were still around 100 members whowere still out as of Wednesday morning.