The Observer

Preparations in advance of last weekend’s snow and ice kept power outages in and around Olive Branch to a minimum, according to Kevin Doddridge, general manager of Northcentral Electric Power Association.

“We started working (Jan. 29),” Doddridge explained. “We planned for the weather well in advance.”

Doddridge said Northcentral instituted its 24-hour storm relief plan, with employees working to try and ensure power remained on as well as working to quickly restore it to customers who lost power.

“We had about 1,500 out,” Doddridge said, adding that Northcentral services approximately 28,000 customers. “A lot were in the Maywood area; it was a pretty difficult situation with all the trees.”

Restoration efforts were complicated by ice-laden tree limbs falling in Maywood, knocking out service shortly after technicians had successfully restored power to local residents.

While the northern part of Northcentral’s service area was the hardest hit, most customers had their electricity restored by 6 p.m. on Jan. 30.

“We still had a few random outages,” Doddridge said, “but we didn’t need any help (from neighboring associations). We do have a substantial amount of follow-up work to do.”

Immediately following the storm, Doddridge said Northcentral’s main objective was to get customers’ power restored. In the coming days and weeks, Northcentral will continue making repairs to damaged areas.

Northcentral EPA is a member-owned electric power distribution cooperative that serves eastern DeSoto County, western Marshall County, and small sections of Tate and Lafayette counties.

Founded in 1950, Northcentral has approximately 1,200 miles of line and serves more than 22,000 residential customers.

Pat Nelson, Entergy’s regional customer service manager for north Mississippi, said Feb. 1 that fewer than 300 Entergy customers lost power over the weekend.

“All customers are back on, but we expect some of these icy branches to continue to fall across power lines, as has happened since we got everyone restored early (Jan. 31),” Nelson noted. “(We’ll) probably continue to see scattered outages for another couple of days until all the ice melts, but for the moment, all customers are restored.

“At the height of the storm, we had just under 300 customers without power,” he continued. “That is an amazingly low number if you look at the ice that accumulated in the trees on Friday afternoon (Jan. 29).”

Outages were reported in almost every county Entergy serves, Nelson stated.

“We got lots of help in quickly and we were thus able to put a crew on every problem within minutes of receiving word of outages,” he added.

Entergy Corporation owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear generator in the United States.

Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $13 billion and approximately 14,700 employees.

A presence in 45 of the state's 82 counties, Entergy Mississippi provides electricity to more than 432,000 residential, business and institutional customers (roughly 16 percent of electric customers in Mississippi) throughout the western half of its namesake state. Its client base includes approximately 361,725 residential, 63,640 commercial and 3,100 industrial customers, as well as more than 4,090 governmental agencies.