VIDEO: North East Mississippi Blackout Highlights Need for Emergency Planning

NOXUBEE COUNTY, Miss.(WCBI)—Equipment failure, bad weather, or wildlife; A power outage can happen for a number of reasons.

Tuesday morning, darkness fell over parts of North East Mississippi, impacting thousands of residents and several facilities.

Noxubee County has an estimated two power outages each year, not a large number but hospital officials tell me they have sturdy plan is put in place.

” The power was out for about an hour but we couldn’t even tell we were impacted by that because we have everything prepared for that,”said Noxubee General Hospital registered nurse Sam Kratzer.

Tuesday morning parts of Kemper and Noxubee County fell into total darkness.

“I came to work this morning and saw the power door open and I thought what’s going on with that thing. I came inside and saw that the lights were off and I though oh no. I came to the nurses station and they were all scrambling around,”said hospital administrator Danny McKay.

McKay says that the patients can’t go too long without a power supply.

” When the power goes off we have emergency generators that pick up within 10 seconds.Generators are wired into the essentials like the elevators for example, the oxygen concentrators, the telephone system, the lighting for the nurses station the essential areas. Not everything but all of the essentials. So we can continue to operate when we have a power outage,”said McKay.

The generators at the hospital are run by natural gas. If the natural gas supply is  interrupted, there are propane tanks to pick up the slack.

Noxubee County EMA Director Corey Brown says for at-home patients a power outage  is a much bigger problem.

” More so for people who are on home medical programs who dialysis at home or people who are on oxygen therapy those are the people we are concerned about when you have a long term power outage.So in those instances we would be trying to make some kind of contact or some kind of arrangements for those people to get to a facility where they have a back up generator,” said Brown.

Brown also said this morning’s power outage highlights the need for residents in the county to enroll in the code red system. He said the system send out updates in emergency situations.
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