More than 40,000 people in Mississippi were still without power Tuesday afternoon after Hurricane Ida downed electric poles across the state.
Mississippi was largely spared from the worst of the storm, which left the entire New Orleans metro area dark and several hundreds thousands of other Louisiana residents without power. Mississippi’s electric problems aren’t as severe, but thousands were still without power Tuesday without clear estimates of when electricity could be restored.
“It may take up to three days before we know how long until power will be restored,” Entergy Mississippi said in a statement to customers Monday. “While we’re assessing damage, we will continue restoring service where it is safe to do so.”
The bulk of the Mississippi outages have been reported by Entergy Mississippi and Magnolia Electric Power, a regional electrical co-op. Pike, Amite, Wilkinson and Pearl River counties were among the most affected by large outages as of Tuesday afternoon.
Magnolia Electric told customers via social media its system had significant damage because of the storm.
“We are looking at extended outages,” Magnolia Electric told customers. “At this time, we cannot give any estimations on when power will be restored to any of the areas. We do have crews working in all areas of our outage system.”
Magnolia Electric reported it had upwards of 30 broken poles in its coverage area early Tuesday morning. In a statement to its customers, the Summit-based electric company said it expected that number to climb. It reported transmission lines to Gillsburg in Amite County were still out. More than half of that county was without power between three electric providers.
In total, Magnolia Electric reported about 17,000 of its customers still without power Tuesday. The company’s own outages from the storm have left it unable to do live updates to its outage maps. Entergy reported just over 19,500 of its own customers were without power as of Tuesday afternoon.
In a Facebook post, Entergy showed a downed tree that fell into a transmission line between Liberty and Gloster, also in Amite County.
“Our crews are repairing damage like this,” the post said, “so we can get the power flowing to the substations and then on to homes and businesses.”
Other than the southwestern Mississippi counties dealing with large outages, a 1,500-person outage was also reported in Hinds County. Smaller outages are also sprinkled throughout the state.
Click here to view Entergy power outage maps.
Click here to view Mississippi Power outage maps.
Click here to view the total number of power outages across Mississippi and other states.
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