Storm delivers flooding, outages

The remnants of Hurricane Harvey made their way across the Mid-South Thursday, starting around noon in Marshall County and moving out about 2 a.m Friday.

Approximately seven inches of rain were dumped in various areas of the county, including Holly Springs and  Barton, according to county administrator Larry Hall.

Flooding began in low-lying areas of roads where rain came down quickly, he said. By 3:30 p.m. Thursday some areas were flooding. County crews put up reflective barrels so people who were out during the early evening hours would not run into flooded roads.

Areas flooding first included Barton and the DeSoto County/Marshall County line. Oakwood Drive flooded and Nonconnah B, a tributary to Nonconnah Creek, took on flood waters. Nonconnah B is the last creek on Highway 309 before it crosses into Tennessee at the state line going north.

There was some flooding in Byhalia as well.

Reports of downed trees started coming in to 911 in the western part of the county after dark, Hall said.

Multiple trees were down on DeSoto Road and southward to South Red Banks Road and the Watson community.

“Around 2 a.m. (Friday) the wind picked up and we had multiple trees down across the northern part of the county north of the Coldwater River,” Hall said.

Four crews worked with chain saws and backhoes removing trees, including some in the Waterford area.

Power outages

Most of the trouble at Northcentral Electric Power Association occurred in Olive Branch, according to Michael Bellipanni, director of marketing and business development.

“Outage calls began coming in around 4:40 p.m. Thursday and multiplied after folks got home from work,” he said. “At its peak, we had over 2,700 customers out in DeSoto and Marshall counties.”

Wind and vegetation took out five circuits overnight.

“Identifying those issues is a challenge, especially in the dark,” Bellipanni said. “Marshall County experienced as many as 500 outages, mainly in the Barton and Chulahoma communities. We did have two broken poles that we had to replace during the daylight Friday on Faulkner Road in the south part of our system.”

Bill Stone, general manager of the Holly Springs Utility Department, said there were scattered outages throughout HSUD’s service area as the storm hit.

“We had outages from Laws Hill to Canaan (in Benton County),” he said.

Approximately 1,600 customers were affected at one time or another.

Stone said HSUD’s workers in the field “did a great job in very difficult conditions.”

And he added that the staff in the office did an excellent job Friday of handling all the phone calls to the office during a big bill day for HSUD also.

A couple of days after the storm had passed, on Saturday, there was another outage in the Benton County area.

“It was actually due to storm damage that didn’t manifest until Saturday night,” Stone said. “If affected everybody north of Ashland in Benton County.”