Planned outage turns into real power outage

CANTON —  Approximately 4,000 Entergy Mississippi customers here and in the surrounding area lost power for nearly nine hours Tuesday evening when a tree fell on a power line, Entergy officials said.

The outage occurred Tuesday evening at 4:36 p.m., Candace Coleman with Entergy said. She said power was restored by 1:15 a.m, Wednesday morning.

According to Coleman, the outage occurred during a planned outage at the Entergy substation south of Canton for upgrades and reliability testing at the substation. She said while power was off at the Canton facility, the city of Canton received power from their substation in Pickens. However, during the planned outage, a tree fell on the line between Pickens and Canton causing the outage.

Coleman said the biggest challenge getting power restored was finding where the line was down as much of the line between Pickens and Canton is in hard-to-reach places either deep in wooded areas or on uneven or swampy ground.

Coleman said trees falling on power lines have been issue.

“We have had a lot of trees down lately,” Coleman said.

She said the recent drought has left many trees and tree limbs in precarious condition. She said in the first three months of 2024 reports of fallen trees were up 160 percent compared to information from previous years based on data collected by Entergy.