Mississippians near two weeks without power after winter storm

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Nearly two weeks after an ice storm knocked out power to her home, Barbara Bishop still finds herself trying to flip the lights on and looking in her fridge for food that has since spoiled.

Bishop, 79, and her 85-year-old husband, George Bishop, live in a rural area near Oxford, Mississippi, where ice-coated trees snapped in half, bringing down power lines and making roads nearly impassable.

After the storm hit, the Bishops took in their son, granddaughter and two children, whose homes lost both power and water.

The family endured days of bitter cold with nothing but a gas heater to keep them warm. For a few days, they lost water.

“It’s just been one of those times you just have to grit, grit your teeth and bare it,” Bishop said.

Nearly 20,000 customers remained without power in northern Mississippi on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. That is down from about 180,000 homes and businesses without power in Mississippi shortly after the storm struck late last month.

Lafayette County, where Oxford is located, had the most remaining outages of any county on Friday, with about 4,200 customers without power, followed by Tippah County with about 3,500. Panola, Yalobusha and Tishomingo counties all had more than 2,000 customers without power.

After days of bitter cold, temperatures in Oxford reached 70 degrees on Friday, but the chunks of ice still littered the ground in shaded areas.

Downed trees had been gathered into large piles on the sides of roads, some burned and still smoldering. While much of the worst damage had been cleared, in some places, power lines still hung low over roads and laid strewn about in parking lots. Everywhere, tree limbs dangled precariously.

Across the street from the Bishops, Russ Jones and his wife have no electricity or water. For days, they used five-gallon buckets filled with water to flush toilets, cooked on their gas stove and stayed warm by their fireplace.

“It’s been a shock to the system,” Jones said, adding that he and his wife began staying with friends who have power a few days ago.

On Friday, Jones’ yard was teaming with volunteers from Eight Days of Hope, a nonprofit that responds to natural disasters. The volunteers cleared snapped tree limbs and hauled away a large tree that had fallen in Jones’ backyard.

The organization arrived days after the storm and has helped dozens of homeowners clean up their yards and patch damaged roofs. It has also served more than 16,000 free meals.

Jones said it was a relief to know he had one less thing on his plate. When a volunteer handed him a free T-shirt and a blanket for his wife, he held back tears.

“It’s just beyond anything I could ever imagine,” he said.