NATCHEZ &045; High winds snapped trees and downed power lines throughout the Miss-Lou late Saturday afternoon and left thousands of homes without electricity.

No injuries or major accidents had been reported as of press time.

However, a tree felled by high winds near New Era in south Concordia Parish trapped several people in their home until authorities could evacuate them, parish Civil Defense Director Morris White said.

The National Weather Service reporting station at the Natchez-Adams Airport reported sustained winds of 23 miles per hour just before 5 p.m., with gusts of up to 45 miles per hour. No hail was reported, and the National Weather Service estimated rainfall to be no more than a quarter of an inch.

Entergy said the storm left about 6,500 customers without power. As of 7 p.m., power had been restored to about 2,000 of those customers.

&uot;We currently have our local network employees working to determine what is needed to restore the electrical service,&uot; said Steven Carothers, customer service representative for Entergy.

&uot;Entergy has employees from outside the Natchez Network headed our way to help with the restoration,&uot; he said. However, he added, &uot;it is possible that some customers will not have their service restored (until) Sunday morning.&uot;

Areas affected most by the Entergy outages in Adams County included Liberty Road east of Seargent S. Prentiss Drive, Morgantown Road and U.S. 61 north of Palestine Road.

However, outages experienced by other electric companies were harder to quantify as of Saturday night.

Customer service lines at Southwest Electric Power Association, which serves much of unincorporated Adams County and adjacent counties, were busy Saturday night.

Dispatchers at the Jonesville, La.-based Concordia Electric Cooperative said that as of 8 p.m. Saturday, they were still too busy to estimate the number of customers still without power or when electricity might be restored.