If anyone was dreaming of a white Christmas, they got it two weeks early as southwest Mississippi residents woke up to a snowy Friday morning.
Pike County Civil Defense Director Richard Coghlan said emergency management officials were expecting 2 inches of accumulation on Thursday, but the snowfall turned out to be much more than that.
“It’s real close to 6 inches. I stuck a ruler in my front yard and it was 51⁄2 inches deep,” Coghlan said.
While the fluffy snow covered trees, rooftops, cars and just about anything else, turning the area into a picturesque winter wonderland, it also brought a slushy mess that snapped tree limbs and powerlines and made driving difficult at best.
Most government offices and schools closed and some businesses took the day off.
Outages struck early, with all of Summit and parts of McComb losing power just before 5 a.m. due to fallen power lines. Tree limbs could be heard snapping under the weight of the snow. Arcing transformers sent multi-hued glows into the sky before dawn, when power went out to all of Summit.
Summit had its power restored late this morning, and Entergy officials expected outages affecting customers in northern McComb to be restored by noon. Officials said all electricity in the company’s local coverage area should be back on tonight, although it’s possible some outages could linger on into Saturday morning.
“We have 50-plus cases in North McComb, Summit, west of 1-55, East McComb are the hardest hit. There are a lot of scattered outages as well,” Entergy spokesman Bill Howard said.
“We caution people to stay away from downed power lines and to report any outages and check our outage map,” he said.
Magnolia Electric Power officials said some of their outages would be restored by noon. Lucy Shell, the electric cooperative’s member services director, said that as of 10 a.m. more than 12,000 meters were without power systemwide, including more than 5,000 in Pike County, 1,934 in Amite County and 1,388 in Walthall County.
“There are seven circuits that are out right now across the system. At this point, we will go into emergency restoration mode and work on the circuits first to get the most people on,” Shell said.
Alek Krautmann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Slidell, La.. said the area received between 4-6 inches of snow.
“It’ll be a continual snow throughout the day today until 3 p.m. The heaviest part has fallen already,” Krautmann said.
Temperatures were around freezing this morning, and Krautmann said after the storm passes it’ll be a little above freezing, allowing the snow to melt.
But that doesn’t mean the area is out of the woods yet, because falling temperatures will freeze whatever snow and slush remains tonight.
“It’ll be in the mid 20s tonight and it’ll freeze whatever is on the ground and on the roads,” he said.
Coghlan said if the snow doesn’t thaw out and dry up then the area will have to deal with black ice, which he said would make travel perilous.
“It’ll be absolutely necessary to stay off the roads. All these roads will be super dangerous,” he said.
All area schools, as well as the Pike County Courthouse and McComb City Hall, all closed today.
“A lot of businesses are closed, simply because there’s no power,” Coghlan said. “Stay at home unless you have to get out or go to work.”
An official with Sanderson Farms, one of the area’s largest employers, said the company will idle today’s second shift at its processing plant on River Ridge Road.
Coghlan asked residents to check on neighbors and keep pets inside.
“Stay in. It’ll go away hopefully tomorrow sometime and we can get some relief. Check on neighbors,” he said. “If you don’t have heat, get somewhere that has heat until all this can get out of here.”
