Public Safety and Infrastructure

A crippling ice storm that swept the South left the North East Mississippi Electric Power Association — the rural co‑op serving the Oxford area — with virtually all of its roughly 30,000 customers knocked out on Sunday, about 23,000 of whom remained without power on Monday as linemen worked around the clock to re‑energize the grid. The outages were part of a sprawling winter system that forecasters warned could drop up to an inch of ice and cause catastrophic tree and power‑line damage, prompting school closures, National Guard deployments and hundreds of thousands of outages and major travel cancellations across multiple states.

The NWS warns up to 100 million people from the Southwest to the Carolinas to brace for a rare, dangerous ice storm that forecasters describe as historically high-impact for both ice and snow. A shallow cold layer will produce freezing rain that freezes on contact, and with an Arctic air mass keeping surfaces below freezing for days—especially in unusually affected areas like Arizona and Texas—accumulated ice could cause prolonged multi-day power outages; officials urge staying off roads during freezing rain and watching for raindrops when surface temperatures are below freezing.