‘Mother Nature gave me ice’: Winter Storm Fern’s systemic turmoil, the holes it revealed and how Mississippi explains its response to cold weather disasters
By Alex Rozier | Originally published by Mississippi Today
This is the first story in a series revisiting Winter Storm Fern.
Every few winters in a global climate pattern, the South falls victim to jet streams blowing weather down from the North, delivering cold fronts to the states least ready for them.
In January, those elements culminated in Winter Storm Fern. Despite large winter storms in recent years, such as in 2021 and 2023, Fern delivered a force and persistence Mississippi hadn’t seen in decades. Months later, as north Mississippians still search for their footing, public officials are wondering what to take away from the catastrophe.
State agencies largely stand by their response to a generational storm – the rest fell in Mother Nature’s hands, they argued. But some local officials and residents are unconvinced, pointing to days-long wait times for supplies like water. Regardless of blame, the storm’s scars are forcing Mississippi leaders to reconsider its readiness for winter weather.
Facing over 5 inches of sleet and wind chills that brought temperatures to single digits, power suppliers across Mississippi succumbed to the conditions, leaving nearly 300,000 in the dark, state officials said. Power and water outages lasted weeks for many, and endured over a month for some.
At least 30 people in the state died, making Winter Storm Fern one of the deadliest natural disasters in Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina. Reported damages in the state – which totalled $416 million in public infrastructure and another $128 million in insurance claims from homes and businesses – stretched nearly 300 miles apart, hitting 33 counties between the southwest and northeast corners of Mississippi.
For many, there’s only one event Fern compares to – the Great Ice Storm of 1994.
Karla White, a nurse and single mother in Tishomingo County, was just a toddler then, but heard stories of the Great Ice Storm from her parents. Now with three children of her own – ages 10, 11 and 13 – White is wondering how to piece her life back together.
As the storm crept in on Jan. 23, families like hers across north Mississippi idled anxiously indoors. They were soon surrounded by a chorus of cracking tree limbs.
“The sound of the trees exploding, I don’t think I’ll ever get that out of my head,” White recalled.
There, they turned piles of the blankets into beds atop concrete floors. They couldn’t find food for the first two days, White said. Each morning, the lights would come on at 6 a.m., and the family would have to occupy itself – “just driving around town or sitting” – until the evening.
“Yeah, it was bad,” White said. “It was so bad.”
After four nights with little sleep, a county official found them a generator, and the family returned home.
But the house they came back to was hardly how they left it. Water pipes had burst under fluctuating pressure from the cold weather, disconnecting their taps and flooding the inside of the trailer. What clothes the family hadn’t left with were drenched, and, without running water, they at times had to substitute their toilet with a bucket.
All told, it took 51 days before White’s power returned, and another four days to get the pipes fixed. Her landlord, she said, refused to fix either issue. White, recovering from a knee injury, hadn’t worked in weeks, and her surgery was delayed by the storm.
Watching YouTube tutorials, the family tried to attach spare poles they found laying in nearby yards, but none were the right fit. Eventually, White got her tax return and paid a professional $1,800 to make the repair.
With her kids’ schools closed for over two weeks, the family stuck to a basic routine: At night, they huddled around the space heater and TV the generator managed to power. During the day, they would either search for food or hang out by the mobile shower and laundry units in town.
In May, weeks after getting the power and water back on, Fern’s aftermath landed one more blow on White. After not working for months and paying thousands of dollars in home repairs, generator fuel and bottled water, the single mother’s expenses climbed out of her reach and her car was repossessed.
White finally had her surgery and is getting ready to return to work, but told Mississippi Today over the phone in June, “ I still feel like we’re in survival mode.”
“ As soon as our power got cut back on, I’m having surgery,” she said. “Now when I’m fixing to get to go back to work, I don’t have a car anymore. I could have at least, you know, maybe done DoorDash or home health or something. I haven’t not had a car in like 15 years.
“I mean, it’s surreal. It’s real life, you know?”
While an extreme example, White’s story reflects the kinds of struggles thousands in north Mississippi endured.
In the months since, state officials have started to ask what lessons, if any, Fern left them with. The question they underscore, though, is whether Mississippi can afford solutions to a problem that only rears its head every 30 years.
‘This was like our hurricane’
In February 1994, a powerful winter storm enveloped most of the entire eastern United States. National media reports on the disaster’s impacts, though, zeroed in on one place in particular.
“The Feb. 9 storm, which at one point stretched like a frigid belt from Arkansas to Maryland, has had the most lingering effect here in northern Mississippi,” read an article in the New York Times’ March 6, 1994, issue, tucked between items on the latest from the Bosnian War and the Tonya Harding Olympics scandal.
Official estimates vary widely, but hundreds of thousands of Mississippians lost power in the Great Ice Storm of 1994. The 6 inches of ice that fell crushed the state’s timber industry, incurring over $1 billion in damages, local reports said. Greenville, Oxford, Cleveland and several other cities lost power to their water systems.
The Bolivar Commercial’s then managing editor, Wayne Nicholas, said the aftermath looked like “Mother Nature went on a bombing run.” The Associated Press’ Phillip Moulden later wrote, “Nothing like it had happened in almost half a century, longtime residents recalled. In terms of dollars, nothing like it had ever happened.”
That is, until 32 years later.
Both the spectrum and degree of damages from Winter Storm Fern were historic. Severing electricity to roughly 10% of the state, Fern also revealed a litany of critical facilities, such as health care centers and water utilities, with vulnerable power sources.
The storm impacted over 150 public water systems, serving over 170,000 people, state records show. Many more homes lost running water because they rely on private wells that require electricity.
Of those systems, 126 issued a boil water notice; 118 systems ran on backup power or went without power as they waited for outside help. At least 25 counties sent requests to the state for generators, fuel or bottled water because of an outage or insufficient backup power at a water provider, according to Mississippi emergency response data. Some public water systems, such as the one in Tippah County, were down completely for over two weeks, local officials said.
From Jan. 22, the day before Fern hit, to Jan. 28, 19 hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other health care centers requested backup power support, state emergency records show. At least seven of those facilities saw their backup power supply fail, necessitating immediate help from the state.
In Tippah County, a hospital and two nursing homes also went without running water for over a week. Several prisons, sewer systems, fire and police departments and 911 systems lost power during the storm and didn’t have sufficient backup supply, records show.
Most consequentially, at least 30 people in the state died in the storm’s aftermath, and another 114 were injured. Of those, at least seven people died from extreme cold, and another seven were killed in fires, state and county records show. Other causes of death included inhaling toxic gas fumes and losing power to a dialysis machine. In Lafayette County, an elderly man died trying to refill his generator and falling on the ice.
Even after the icy precipitation receded on Jan. 25, freezing overnight temperatures persisted through the whole next week. Travel remained impossible for many as officials slowly chipped away at the slippery roads.
Charles Keel, a truck driver who lives in Batesville, hunkered down with his wife, son Jacob and four dogs before the storm hit, equipped with enough gasoline and firewood to last four days without power. It turned out that wasn’t nearly enough.
“It was a very, very miserable ordeal,” Keel said.
After running out of fuel on the fourth day, the couple decided to drive to Greenwood, but only after using a chainsaw to carve through a labyrinth of fallen trees and limbs to reach the main road.
In Greenwood, Keel said he waited in line for nearly three hours at a Tractor Supply store to refill his gas jugs. The couple spent about three days in a hotel in the Delta before heading back to Batesville, and they slept in a camper in the front yard that the generator kept warm. Between the hotel – including for his four dogs – fuel and traveling, Keel said he spent about $3,500 that week.
“If (the store) hadn’t gotten propane in when they did, we’d have probably froze to death,” he said.
Like many in the state’s rural areas, Keel also lost running water because his private well is hooked up to an electric pump. He said he went to the local Love’s gas station to take a shower, but only did so a couple times because it cost $17.
In total, Keel went 15 days without power, and he estimates he went through nearly 200 gallons of fuel. But about 10 days in, after officials reopened U.S. 55 for travel, the trucker had to return to work.
“I couldn’t go without a job for three weeks,” he said.
Through the ordeal, Keel said his wife grew frustrated with their situation – “(She) got mad, said I didn’t prepare enough,” he said – and after he got back on the road, she moved in with another man who did have power, Keel said.
The Batesville man said he was frustrated with both how long it took officials to clear the highway and to restore power, saying it felt like they were focused more on denser populations rather than the kind of rural areas where he lives.
“ I’ve driven all over this country, and I ain’t never had an interstate shut down more than a few hours,” Keel said.
In the emotional days and weeks that followed Fern, Mississippi lawmakers questioned the state’s response, wondering why more resources weren’t prepositioned closer to impacted areas.
“I hope you remember how my people were cold, and we as a state, we failed them,” Sen. Rita Parks, a Republican from Corinth, said in a speech on the Senate floor on Feb. 12. “I’m included.”
Since then, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency clarified that it did move supplies before the storm to Camp McCain, a military station in Grenada. Moreover, MEMA said it was in contact with local responders days before the storm to see what needs they had – specifically checking for generators, one of the biggest shortfalls in what places needed versus what they had.
“I had asked and evaluated, ‘Hey, do we have any nursing homes, any water systems that don’t have generators on them?’” MEMA’s executive director, Stephen McCraney, told Mississippi Today. “I was told, ‘We’re all good.’ It wasn’t the case.”
MEMA’s director of external affairs, Scott Simmons, later confirmed that the agency also reached out to the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the Mississippi State Department of Health before the storm about their backup power needs.
Despite those conversations, a number of critical facilities under the purview of both MDOC and the Health Department had power issues directly before or after Fern hit.
The state’s efforts, some local officials said, weren’t enough. While Camp McCain, for instance, is about 100 miles north of MEMA’s headquarters just outside of Jackson, it’s still over a two-hour drive from hard-hit places like Ripley, Corinth and Iuka.
“The state, they should have staged heavier equipment closer to where they knew we were gonna get hit,” Tishomingo County emergency director Peyton Berklite said.
For comparison, MEMA stages equipment closer to the Gulf Coast to prepare for hurricanes, Berklite said.
“Well, this was like our hurricane,” she said. “They knew about where the line was projected to come in to be ice versus rain. They could have brought more equipment and staged it closer.”
Iuka, the county seat of Tishomingo County and where Karla White lives, is as far as one can drive from the state capital while still being in Mississippi. At one point, a truck full of supplies headed to Tishomingo County from Jackson couldn’t reach its destination because roads into the county were blocked from nearly every direction, Berklite said. The truck never arrived, she said, and instead the county got a different shipment from Atlanta.
In Yalobusha County, emergency director Stewart Spence said it took “at least” two or three days to receive supplies like water and tarps during the early parts of the storm response.
“Something that should have been available, it took days to get stuff like that in,” Spence said, while adding the state’s response speed picked up as time went by.
He echoed Berklite, wondering why the state didn’t spread out more supplies throughout north Mississippi before the storm.
From Jan. 21, just before Fern hit, to Jan. 31, MEMA received 661 resource requests from local entities. A majority of those were for generators, fuel, beds, water, meals and clearing debris.
Records Mississippi Today requested included response times for a small sample of those requests, 84. On average, it took about two days for MEMA to complete or deploy resources for a request, an analysis found. While a majority took less than two days, some resources took as long as six days to reach local officials after they made the request.
“There are a lot of conversations that need to happen around: When is the National Guard deployed, when does MEMA deploy, when does (the Mississippi Department of Transportation) deploy,” Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill said. “We heard for five days, MEMA can’t get there because the roads are too dangerous. And they were, but had we pre-deployed supplies and people, we wouldn’t have had to wait five days to get water.”
While acknowledging there are improvements local governments can make as well, Tannehill said there should be clarity on what individuals and city officials need to do to prepare versus what falls in the state’s hands.
“I think we have to chart a path from here so that every community knows, what is my responsibility, what is the state’s responsibility, what can I count on, what do I need to prepare for myself?” the mayor said. “That was just not clear. It was very, very difficult to be the leader of a community where very few have power and very few have water for a period of time, and help is not on the way.”
Most local officials who spoke to Mississippi Today said that, once the storm hit, MEMA did as much as it could have given the amount of ice and debris on the roads.
Marshall County emergency manager Jason Motz, for instance, said generators got to him “surprisingly fast” given the extent of damages in rural areas.
“(The state is) supporting the rest of us local emergency managers, so they understand that role and do a pretty good job of getting things where they need to be,” Motz said. “No one can have everything. Anytime you have a large-scale event like that, it’s going to take multiple agencies and support from other areas, whether it be federal or state or local.”
Local officials commended MEMA, the National Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for providing life-saving assistance, such as helping to power and run warming centers and checking on elderly residents. And as one added, many of the first responders were dealing with the same issues as those they were serving.
“During this ice storm, government really did work for the people,” said Tom Lindsay, emergency director for Tippah County, one of the hardest hit areas. “ They worked really hard. That’s something that the people really probably didn’t understand. People would call me and say, ‘I haven’t had power in 14 days,’ and I kinda smile and say, ‘Yes, ma’am, I haven’t either.’”
In the northeast corner of the state, officials had to deliver supplies on a Chinook helicopter when roads weren’t drivable, Alcorn County emergency manager Evan Gibens said.
Gibens said it took four to five days after the storm to get their first load of outside resources, emphasizing that resources from MEMA, such as a generator for a storm shelter there, “very much helped save lives.”
Asked if he agreed with other local officials about the lack of pre-positioned supplies, Gibens deferred to those “above his pay grade.”
“That would be a question that you would have to ask to the state on why those assets weren’t pre-staged ahead of time,” he told Mississippi Today.
Mississippi’s ‘kryptonite’
After criticisms of their response to Fern rang loudly through the state Capitol, leadership at MEMA and the Mississippi Department of Transportation sat down with Mississippi Today to give their perspective.
Both agencies emphasized the human nature of disaster response. The state’s responders, many of whom were living without power or water themselves, were being thrown into dangerous conditions – dark skies, long hours, freezing temperatures and cars driving past them on icy roads with drivers who ignored caution.
McCraney, MEMA’s chief since 2021, pointed to the public perception of disaster response versus reality. He echoed the slogan often used by emergency responders around the country, “The first 72 (hours) are on you.” McCraney’s point was that individuals have to be able to handle a disaster’s initial impacts themselves because the state can’t be everywhere, especially when a storm has a footprint as wide as Fern.
After Katrina hit in 2005, Gulf Coast residents adjusted their lives to prioritize hurricane preparation, McCraney said. To better handle ice storms, north Mississippians will need to adapt similarly, he said.
Putting it more plainly, McCraney said MEMA isn’t funded to be a first responder.
“I think our response was spot on,” he said. “(To) those who wondered, ‘Where’s MEMA? Why aren’t they here?’ We’re not a first responder. If you want me to be a first responder, fund me.”
As for power failures at critical facilities, MSDH told Mississippi Today that while it assesses backup power capacity for the state’s healthcare facilities, it does so through “interval” surveys that include inspecting equipment.
“Facilities are responsible for ensuring their emergency systems are operational, validated through mandatory training and testing, and updated to reflect their specific facility-based risk assessments,” the department said in a statement.
The department also oversees the state’s drinking water systems. When asked about obstacles for maintaining backup power for water systems, MSDH pointed to funding and the expertise needed to know what a system’s needs are.
Among Fern’s greatest impacts was its grip on north Mississippi’s roads. Frozen roads filled with fallen tree limbs made in-person contact of any kind a tall order, let alone for rescue missions or supply drops.
As such, few received more criticism from the public than MDOT and its executive director, Brad White. In a March interview, White defended the agency and acknowledged its shortfalls.
Before Fern came, MDOT put out the largest amount of road pre-treatment in the agency’s history with 206,000 gallons of brine. MDOT said its total storm response and preparation, including debris removal, cost over $25 million.
Part of the issue, White said, was freezing rain washed away the brine before it could set in. Another issue, he said, was MDOT’s 900 road maintenance employees – which White said was half the size it was in 1994 – were divided between plowing 15,000 miles of impacted highways and bridges, and clearing debris for first responders such as ambulances to rescue victims.
“ To say our folks were overwhelmed, I think would be an understatement,” White said.
Progress clearing the roads slowed because after plowing ice during warmer temperatures in the daytime, the roads would refreeze overnight.
“ We would put the salt out and start plowing, and it kind of starts turning the ice into slush that you could plow off,” he described. “When the sun would go back down that slush would refreeze in a way that it looked like a skating rink.”
It wasn’t until Jan. 28, five days in, when the temperature stayed above freezing long enough for MDOT to make a notable difference clearing the roads, White said.
Looking back, the agency head listed a few lessons he took away from Fern: Given the chance to redo things, White said he would’ve sent more of MDOT’s decision-makers to north Mississippi to have a better idea of what was happening “on the ground.”
He said MDOT will also look to increase its capacity for storing salt, as well as buying dump trucks equipped with snow plows that can be used year-round. White added it would help if the state Legislature allowed him to better pay the agency’s staff – starting pay is just around $29,000, he said.
The agency later said it plans to request salary bumps to recruit and keep maintenance crews. As far as funding for other upgrades, MDOT said it was still calculating a number.
“There’s not really a single figure – likely somewhere in the millions – as it comes down to everything from materials and equipment to actual buildings to properly store these materials in a way that makes the most justifiable sense to taxpayers,” MDOT said via e-mail.
As for MEMA, it’s unclear what changes, if any, it plans to make or request from lawmakers.
Parks, the Corinth senator, told Mississippi Today in March she had met with MEMA, and that the agency promised to locate more personnel and resources to north Mississippi to better handle future winter storms.
MEMA declined to verify Parks’ account of their conversation, but said it will complete an “After Action” report to discern what improvements it can make.
“If we do see another Ice Storm event approaching in the future, we will take the lessons learned from Winter Storm Fern and apply them to planning and prepositioning,” Simmons, the agency’s spokesperson, said. “But each event is different.”
McCraney and White cautioned against overreacting to a “generational” event. If, after the 1994 storm, the state had invested in all the resources and equipment it needed for that disaster, those supplies would have just sat around for the next three decades, they argued.
“ It doesn’t make sense for us to spend that much of the taxpayers’ money on something that may come around every 30 years,” White said.
McCraney agreed, saying “you’d just be burning money” buying materials the state only needs that often. MEMA, for instance, owns 150 generators and rents however many more it needs because of the cost of maintaining and storing additional supply.
But Mississippi’s reflection of its response to Fern has just begun.
The state’s Public Service Commission is holding a summit in Tupelo, June 23-24, to ensure “Mississippi communities, utilities, and local governments are better prepared for whatever the next storm brings.”
Sen. Scott DeLano, a Republican from Biloxi, also told Mississippi Today lawmakers would have hearings over the summer to look back at the response.
Officials are confident changes will come, similar to the months and years after Katrina. But for now, it’s unclear what deficiencies officials will take on, and what the state will chalk up to a “generational” event.
Despite Mississippi’s long track record responding to disasters – everything from hurricanes to tornadoes to flooding – Fern proved to be the state’s “kryptonite,” McCraney said.
“If Mother Nature only gave me snow, it would’ve been a whole lot easier,” he said. “But Mother Nature gave me ice.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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