Thousands of homes remained without power across Mississippi on Saturday afternoon, two weeks after an ice storm froze over the northern part of the state, downing trees, toppling power lines and killing at least 29 people statewide.
As temperatures rebounded to well above freezing on Saturday, local utilities had yet to restore electricity to around 15,000 customers concentrated around Lafayette County and the hard-hit town of Oxford, according to the site poweroutage.us. The storm had initially knocked out power to 10 times as many people across the region.
The persistent power outages have fallen most heavily on rural areas, where debris and downed lines continued to pose challenges, according to spokespeople for a regional utility provider and Lafayette County’s emergency management agency.
Beau Moore, an emergency management officer for the county, said the region had a monthslong cleanup process ahead.
“This impact we’ve had from trees for the power companies, the utilities, is like if an EF1, EF2 tornado was 700 miles wide and hit the county all at one time,” Mr. Moore said, adding that he expected several thousand people to remain without power for at least another week.
In a statement published to her Facebook account on Thursday, Mayor Robyn Tannehill of Oxford said that after two weeks of cleanup efforts, the city still faced a long road to recovery. For now, she said efforts were focused on clearing brush and downed trees from the city’s streets as students returned to the University of Mississippi, which is in Oxford and closed its campus in anticipation of the storm.
“We are a long way from back,” Ms. Tannehill wrote. “We still have citizens with no power. We have houses with trees through the roof and yards buried in trees. But it does feel like the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned back on.”
On Friday, President Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he would approve Gov. Tate Reeves’s request for a major disaster declaration from the White House, including support for local governments undertaking cleanup efforts. The declaration, Mr. Trump wrote, would make available $39 million to aid the recovery.
Sarah Brooke Bishop, a spokeswoman for North East Mississippi Electric Power Association, which supplies power to Lafayette County, said that the storm had initially knocked out power to roughly 28,000 of the 30,000 meters in their systems. After working to get substations back up and running and restoring major connections, repair crews had brought that number down to 4,200, she said.
“For a lot of areas, even in the city, our crews have had to literally cut their way in to be able to start restoration efforts,” Ms. Bishop said. She said she couldn’t provide a timeline for when service would be fully restored, but with nice weather expected over the weekend into early next week, she said the utility was hoping to make significant progress.
