When severe thunderstorms pounded the county and an F-1 tornado that hit Dell early Sunday morning brought dangerously strong straight-line winds into the Blytheville/Gosnell area, the community was rocked by a destructive force in the form of wind, flying debris, and tossed vegetation/trees that brought extensive damage to the community and its power infrastructure.
Early Sunday evening, the Entergy company website informed Mississippi County customers, "Severe thunderstorms impacted the Blytheville area over the early morning hours of Sunday, April 30...Over 10,400 customers were without power at 9 a.m. this morning. As of 4:30 p.m., 4,500 customers are without power (in Mississippi County). 16 damage assessment workers are engaged in the area and 40 percent of the damage has been assessed. Currently, 22 Entergy workers are engaged in restoration efforts, and additional resources are expected to arrive tonight."
MCEC also reported on its Facebook page Sunday, "Attention members in the Gosnell area: Our energy supplier [Entergy] for your substation is working to reroute the power feeds and restore power to the substation. In addition, we currently have about 16 poles broken around the Gosnell Nursing Home area and crews are working to replace all of them as quickly and safely as possible."
The initial estimate on Entergy's website, as of Sunday night, was that most customers should have power restored to them by 10 p.m. Wednesday night.
As of Tuesday afternoon at 4:20 p.m., Matt Faries, Customer Service Manager for Entergy said that there are still approximately 450 homes without power within the city of Blytheville and approximately another 100 homes within the county. He said that the outages are scattered and that it is there estimate that "the overwhelming majority of those will be back up and going by 11 p.m. tonight (Tuesday)."
Faries added, "There have been about 160 workers employed in Blytheville. Everyone collapsed on Blytheville after the other areas were taken care of. We will have crews in the city tomorrow and Thursday and we encourage our customers to report things they see like trees on lines or broken poles that did not result in power outages, so that we can address these issues while we have the resources here to do so. They can report those things by calling 1-800-entergy. We also want to thank everyone for their patience and the Blytheville Police Department and all other agencies that helped during this event. "
The CN was unable to reach anyone from the MCEC for an update before press time Tuesday evening.
Late Sunday afternoon, Blytheville Mayor James Sanders said that he believes a tornado caused the extensive damage in Blytheville, pointing to a path of downed trees and damaged roofs in the Denny/Sawyer Streets area. He also noted the twisted tree limbs are an indication that a tornado caused the damage.
The National Weather Service (NWS) confirmed Monday afternoon that at 2:07 a.m. Sunday morning, a "tornado began approximately 1.5 miles west-southwest of Dell and moved Northeast along Highway 18...eventually lifting 4 miles northeast of Dell."
The NWS went further to say that the tornado was on the ground for approximately six minutes, went 5.6 miles and was approximately 150 yards wide with an intensity rating of EF-1.
A spokesman of the NWS told the CN Monday, that what Blytheville experienced were very strong straight-line winds
From 3 a.m. until about 3:30 p.m., Public Works crews worked to clear roads and storm drains and continued to work Monday on other phases of the recovery effort.
Blytheville Police Department assistant police chief Ricky Jefferson said that numerous trees were down in the city and structural damage had occurred to some homes. He also added that a tree had fallen onto a home located on Lynn Street.
Numerous trees were knocked down within the city. Some included very old, large trees that when they fell blocked streets, landed on homes/vehicles and one even fell on top of the Walker Park Gazebo.
As of Sunday, several of the power poles that fell on the Highway 239 Spur railroad tracks, as well as trees that covered a portion of Highway 239 Spur, still blocked traffic as well.
Perhaps the largest evidence of damage was the destruction of the Cotton Growers Gin just east of Dell on highway 18.
Within the city of Blytheville itself, numerous homes and businesses also were damaged. The Shell station on the Service Road near the Super 8 hotel suffered extensive damage. Part of the canopy over the Lowe's garden center was blown off, several signs had been destroyed throughout the city including the Day's Inn sign (which had been twisted and blown down) as a result of the storm and several streets remained flooded and littered with storm debris on Sunday.
As of Tuesday evening, efforts were still underway to restore power to all area homes as quickly as possible. The effort included many people, including the two power companies and their out of town recovery crews, city public works workers and many neighbors and volunteers. Much of the work included clearing out downed vegetation in order to help prepare homes to be “able to receive power” once power was restored to their neighborhoods.
In addition to at least 53 power poles being downed, miles of downed wire and the necessary resetting of many circuit breakers; the effort was compounded by the fact that numerous homes in the area were still “unable to accept power” due to the storm damage on the property of individual homeowners.
Matt Faries, Customer Service Manager for Entergy, said Monday just before noon, that at peak outage (early Sunday morning) within the immediate city of Blytheville area, there were approximately 6,000 homes without power. As of 7 a.m. Monday morning, that number had been reduced to approximately 2,800 homes.
He added that Entergy experienced at least 35 power poles knocked down within the city alone by vegetation and the strong winds.
Faries also confirmed that the main feed had, at that time, already been restored to the Gosnell substation. He also added that the company still had 15 scouts in the immediate Blytheville area assessing damage and at least 25 linemen in the city working to restore power to those homes that were still without electricity.
Entergy has been involved with extensive simultaneous restoration efforts across large portions of the state of Arkansas as a result of the storms that barreled though the state Saturday night and very early Sunday morning – with the largest number of outages reported being in the Little Rock, Searcy, Hot Springs and Conway areas.
“We continue to bring in more crews until there are people working in each outage,” Faries explained. “I want to remind everyone to stay away from downed power lines. Also, thank you for your patience and understanding.”
He also said that real time outage data can always be found online at www.entergystormcenter.com.
Neil Burge, Vice Chairman of the Mississippi County Electric Cooperative (MCEC) Board of Directors, in regards to MCEC efforts to restore power to their customers said Monday, “We had a lot of damage in the Dell and Gosnell areas. There were about 17-18 poles down around the Gosnell Nursing Home. They hope to have everyone back on today. We have crews in from Little Rock and other places to help us get power restored.”
He also said that in addition to the poles and other repair work, the linemen also have to reset numerous circuit breakers that were knocked offline when the power feed was lost.
“It will be restored to everyone just as quickly as possible,” Burge added.