Residents manage overnight severe storms in Lowndes County
LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) — Severe storms swept through the Golden Triangle Monday night, leaving many people dealing with the aftermath.
Columbus and the New Hope area of Lowndes County were hit particularly hard, and today, people were cleaning up fallen trees and other debris and assessing the damage left behind.
Utility crews were out working to make sure power was restored in several areas.
It was a stormy Monday in Columbus and New Hope, and around the Golden Triangle.
High winds took out several trees and utility poles and caused significant damage around the area.
Lowndes County Emergency Management reports that trees fell on homes along Gaylane Drive and Waterworks Road.
Clay County also suffered the effects of the overnight storms.
Many people were also left in the dark.
“There were major outages because it affected circuits that are from a substation, so that is a lot of people on one line,” Jon Turner said. “If it happens at a particular place, people downstream from that issue are all without power. The good news about that is once you fix that issue, most of those people come back on.”
4-County Electric Power Association reports more than 700 homes were out of power in Lowndes and Clay Counties.
Marketing and Public Relations Manager, Jon Turner said it is a blessing in disguise to have larger areas with power outages.
“This is the kind of thing we don’t like to see outages but when we do have outages, we prefer one that affects a lot of people because that means that it is easier and faster to get all those people back on,” Turner said.
Turner said the power has been fully restored but 4-County is still on the look out.
“We are just getting ready for the next potential round so we are watching the weather this afternoon, we will watch the weather for Wednesday afternoon as well, prepping as we do to get ready for any potential overnight issues,” Turner said.
It’s not just the current rounds of wind and rain that caused the trees to topple.
“Trees get stressed in the summer time cause there’s been a lot of droughts here lately,” Turner said. “Trees get stressed in the winter time because it gets really cold, we had ice on they start to breaking. When it rains and there’s heavy winds then it knocks down healthy trees plus the ones that are stressed so all of that plays into what affects our power.”
The National Weather Service and Lowndes County Emergency Management report no tornado touched down Monday night.
