Entergy Mississippi works to shore up remaining customers without power following Friday storm

After working throughout the weekend to counteract the power losses caused by a collection of storms and a tornado over the weekend, Entergy Mississippi reported that, as of 10 p.m. Sunday, March 26, nearly 20,000 customers remained in the dark, and more statewide.

These figures were down from the 15,398 northern customers at the height of the Friday, March 24, 2023, night storms, and another 21,128 southern and central customers hit on Sunday. Restoration work has included crews of more than 800 lineworkers, substation workers, damage assessment scouts, vegetation workers, and support personnel deployed to fix hundreds of battered poles, transformers, cross arms, and spans of wire.

“So far, this storm has brought down 279 spans of wire,” Entergy Mississippi’s Twitter account posted Sunday night. “Each span of wire measures about 275 feet long. That’s about 15.4 miles of wire crews have to pick up, inspect and reinstall! If we laid it all out, it would nearly stretch across the Grand Canyon.”

According to a corporate update today, 25 poles, 438 transformers, 174 cross arms, and 472 spans of wire are in need of repair. As Entergy Mississippi put it in that same update: “Our communities are hurting.”

Still, Entergy Mississippi reported that even in the most heavily damaged areas – Rolling Fork and Silver City, Mississippi – most customers capable of safely receiving power should be back in service by the night of Wednesday, March 29. A mobile substation was also deployed in Winona, Mississippi, which increased recovery times. Service should be back to most by 10 p.m. Tuesday, March 28.

Additional storms in the intervening time complicated restoration efforts, thanks to a mix of heavy winds, lightning, and golf ball-sized hail that brought still more outages. At the peak of a Sunday storm, 21,128 customers went dark, but work got those numbers down to 14,303 central and southern territory customers as of 8:30 p.m. As Sunday wound to a close, 19,721 customers remained without power statewide.

As damage estimates are still being processed, some restoration figures may change as the picture becomes clearer.