The Lamar County Board of Supervisors has approved the proclamation of the existence of a local emergency following a tornado that swept through the county Sunday evening.
The proclamation was approved during a special-called meeting Monday morning and will speed up recovery resources for the storm, which touched down at about 7:30 p.m. near the Pine Burr area in the eastern part of the county and moved southwest across a large rural area.
“It helps expedite resources, enables us to share resources and have other folks help us,” Lamar County Administrator Jody Waits said. “It’s just the first step in moving forward in trying to recover from it. Once we declare the emergency, then we get in line for the state’s help and any other possibilities.”
James Smith, director of the Lamar County Emergency Management Agency, said officials are still in the process of surveying damage. According to the National Weather Service in Jackson, the storm was rated an EF-4, with estimated winds of 170 miles per hour, a path length of 54.2 miles, and a maximum path width of 1.25 miles.
“It looks like in Pine Burr, (the track) is going to be pretty wide,” Smith said. “It kind of gets less as we go toward Purvis and we get more tree damage.
“We’ve still got some minor house damage in this (Purvis) area, but nothing like we had at Pine Burr. A lot of power lines were tied up in it, and we’ve got a main transmission line from Mississippi Power down out there on Pine Burr Road, so that’s going to take a while there.”
As on Monday morning, three church groups – First Baptist, Good Hope and Temple – were working in the area to tarp roofs. Approximately 100 tarps were available at the Lamar County Emergency Operations Center office, with 200 more on order.
In addition, a feeding crew set up at the Bay Creek fire station to deliver meals to storm victims and emergency workers in that area.
Damage assessment will start Tuesday morning and is expected to take several days, and county trash pickup will be delayed one day for the remainder of the week.
“We’ve still got a lot of roads with power lines down that we can’t get in, so we haven’t got access to all places yet,” Smith said. “So the road crew is working on that now with the power company, trying to get all that worked out, but it’s going to take us a while to gain access to everywhere we need to.
“But I can’t say enough about the road crew and the fire departments and the police – those guys were tremendous, and they worked their butts off.”
No injuries or fatalities were reported after the storm.
“It seems like everybody listened to the media and to social media, because they hunkered down and took shelter,” Smith said. “We had about 70 people in the shelter here in Purvis at one time – that’s the most we’ve ever had.
“So I think that goes back to the Easter Sunday storms; they were well aware of what was going on and paying attention to it. That’s one of the big things we wanted to make sure of, was no injuries and no fatalities.”
