Share This Article
While the weather outside isn’t that frightful, the snow storm that hit the Ozarks Tuesday evening is causing some issues for residents in Baxter County.
At the time of writing, roughly 29,733 residents in Baxter, Fulton, Izard, Lawrence, Marion, Sharp and Stone counties are still without power.
Last night’s snowstorm wasn’t a particularly cold one, but it brought roughly nine inches of wet, heavy snow with it. That snow dragged down powerlines and tree limbs, resulting in blown transformers and downed lines throughout North Central Arkansas.
“We still are assessing damage but have not found any broken poles yet,” said Tori Moss, a spokesperson with NAEC. “Most damage is from lines sagging under snow’s weight and trees in the lines. Restoration efforts likely will continue into the weekend.
About 53,000 residents throughout the entire state were impacted by the storm.
According to a news report on KTLO, Tuesday night’s snowfall broke records for Baxter County. Prior to Tuesday, the county’s record with three inches of snow on the same date in 1978.
“Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas crews are continuing efforts to restore electric service to approximately 53,000 members that were impacted by yesterday’s severe winter weather,” said Rob Roedel of Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas. “North Arkansas Electric Cooperative of Salem and Carroll Electric Cooperative of Berryville suffered the brunt of the outages. Many other local electric cooperatives are also addressing outages.”
Baxter County suffered some of the highest outage rates this year with almost 14,000 residents losing power. Those power outages also affected several neighborhoods of Mountain Home.
Fulton County followed behind with over 6,300 outages. Both Izard and Sharp County’s experienced roughly 4,000 outages each. The remaining counties had outages that ranged from 50 or so residents to a few hundred.
In Mountain Home, Mayor Hillrey Adams released the word that crews with the Street Department would be working in 12 hour shifts to clear and salt the roads so that residents could make their way to work.
There were a few crashes throughout the night, with some sliding off the road into ditches along Highway 5 South and Highway 69. Traffic was backed up for a short time Tuesday night while those accidents were cleared from the road.
Baxter County’s courthouse was closed for the day on Wednesday. The City of Mountain Home opened its offices later in the morning. Mountain Home Public Schools and other surrounding school districts took a snow day.
Crews with NAEC were seen removing snow from tree limbs and power lines in the early morning hours of Wednesday.
“I hope everyone who takes for granted flipping that light switch off and on will now appreciate the hardworking guys who literally put their lives on the line to see that we have that privilege,” said Leisha McCoy in a Facebook post thanking NAEC crews for their hard work. “Thank you to all of you. Stay safe and I pray that everyone will show their appreciation by being patient until power is restored.”
While the outages caused some inconveniences, the public showed strong support for work crews with NAEC. Echo and Bee, a new restaurant and café in Mountain Home, offered up hot coffee to line and road crews on Wednesday.
The restaurant also promoted a pay it forward option for residents that wished to purchase hot meals for work crews.
Entergy, another electric company in North Central Arkansas, also saw its fair of problems on Tuesday night, with some 1,111 residents out of power in Baxter County. Some 4,400 Entergy customers in Marion lost power. Another 6,000 plus customers lost power in Boone County.
Most major roads in Baxter County are clear, with some slush on them. This week’s snow is expected to melt by the weekend. The National Weather Service is currently showing another round of potential snow and ice for North Central Arkansas next Tuesday.
