Starkville sees widespread power outage on New Year’s Eve

As the citizens of Starkville celebrated the end of what has not be a very enjoyable 2020 on Thursday night, the year did not go down without trying to put a damper on New Year’s Eve plans.

On Thursday night, a pair of power outages in widespread areas of the city were caused by a falling tree hitting one of Starkville Utilities’ distribution lines and a piece of equipment at one of their substations which needed to be isolated so service could be restored.

The initial outage occurred around 6:30 p.m. when the tree landed on a power line that cut power from the north side of Starkville east of OCH Regional Medical Center.

Most of the affected residents’ power was back on around 7:50 p.m.

Roughly an hour later, a second outage emanating from the same issue as the first outage took place on the south and west sides of Starkville, affecting areas such as Academy Village, South Montgomery Street and Louisville Street.

During both outages, affected residents took to social media to give reports and voice their questions on when the power would be fixed and what the outages. Mayor Lynn Spruill took to Twitter to aid the affected residents with updates.

“When you put the two (outages) together, it would be city wide,” Spruill wrote. “Fortunately, it is a sequence rather than a concurrent outage.”

At 10:18 p.m., Spruill tweeted that Starkville Utilities had resolved the issue and that everyone’s power was back on.