Storm leaves thousands without power in Choctaw County

CHOCTAW COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – A line of strong storms tore across North Mississippi Sunday night, leaving over 3,000 families in the area without power.

On Monday morning, 4-County Electric Power Association crews worked around the clock to restore the power in Choctaw and Oktibbeha County.

Sunday’s storm left a tangle of downed power lines and trees.

“We’re finding some scattered stuff this morning, services to houses that we’re working on, couple of broke service poles this morning,” said Manager of consumer services Cliff Wall.

Wall said those strong winds left many customers in the dark… especially in the Ackerman area.

“It broke three of our double circuit poles out of our Ackerman substation and at that point, we have about 2,000 people out of power in Choctaw County,” said Wall.

Wall said it was all hands on deck to get power restored to those homes as quickly as possible.

“We have guys that are on call 24/7, they are the first responders to the outages. We contact our crews if need be to start rolling into the office get the trucks to find out what kind of materials we need and head to where the lines are down. We sent two crews to Choctaw County last night to take care of those double circuit poles and try to have everyone on that could get on by midnight,” said Wall.

Their efforts paid off.

Wall said as of Monday afternoon they were down to about 20 homes without power.

WCBI’s Meteorologist Jacob Dickey said Sunday’s storm brought damaging wind speeds.

“To bring down power lines like in Choctaw County we’d have to have winds at least 60 mph come through and even for trees in the area. The severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado warnings generally mean above 58 mph but our grounds were saturated so we had trees coming down at 50 mph winds. The National Weather Service will make the final assessments if the damage is from a tornado or from straight-line winds,” said Dickey.

Meantime, 4-County Electric Power is making sure its customers aren’t left in the dark.

Wall said those 20 homes that are without power should have their power restored by Monday evening.