Funnel clouds reported near Opp
Published 12:14 am Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Severe thunderstorms wrought havoc Saturday and Sunday, with reports of three funnel clouds in the county.
EMA Director Susan Harris said for the weather occurring locally, the damages came out fairly well.
“The are no other reports to FEMA to be done,” she said. “We had only one structure that had damage to the garage reported to me. That was down Bush Isle Road.”
Harris said there were a lot of trees and power lines down in the county.
“We had three funnel clouds reported,” she said. “All in the Opp area. The first was south of Libertyville on Hwy. 55 when we had our first eyes on it. It headed straight northeast. When it got to Opp, it began to form other funnel clouds. Opp Police had their eyes on it.”
The funnel clouds never produced tornados.
“We just had straight line winds,” she said.
Covington County was placed under a tornado warning three times over the weekend – once Saturday night and twice Sunday morning.
Stacey Parker, general manager of Opp Utilities, said the city had one significant outage affecting the west side of town, along with a few isolated outages.
Covington Electric Cooperative reported about 65 members without power just after lunch on Sunday.
There was a broken pole on Ellis Street in River Falls, as well as outages in Coffee and Geneva counties.
On Saturday, a fallen pine tree on Hwy. 137 caused a three-phase power pole to break and caused an outage near Wing.
There was also an outage due to Saturday’s severe weather in the Pleasant Home area, which impacted 337 members.
Andalusia also experienced an outage due to breakers tripping at two substations in town.