Rain pounds area with 3-6 inches of rain

Published 12:24 am Sunday, July 29, 2012

NATCHEZ — Rain showers pounded Adams County Saturday morning, causing eddies to swirl in a bloated St. Catherine’s Creek and rain gauges to catch up to 6 inches of rain in some areas.

The storm, which was accompanied by thunder and winds, prompted the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood warning for the area that expired at 11:30 a.m.

Delana Tradewell, a Seale Road resident who lives near the creek off of Morgantown Road behind Historic Jefferson College, said when she first heard the rain at 6 a.m., she dismissed it as great sleeping weather.

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“I just rolled back over,” Tradewell said.

But at approximately 8 a.m., she got out of bed to see why her horses were making so much noise.

“They had maybe 10 feet of pasture left (that wasn’t flooded),” Tradewell said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, and it was so quick,” she said.

Stan Owens, the director of the Adams County Emergency Management Agency, said the rain gauge at his Morgantown residence caught a little more than 3 and 1/4 inches of rain, but he had heard of other area gauges that measured 6 inches.

The most significant part of the storm was how fast rain dumped on the area, Owens said.

Owens said his rain gauge collected more than 1 1/2 inches in one hour.

“That’s a pretty significant amount of rain for that short of a period,” he said.

Owens said he heard reports of flooded property from areas including Kingston and Liberty Road.

The storm also resulted in felled trees, including three trees down in the Lagrange area, three in Cranfield, two near Liberty Road, one on Springfield Road and one on Jeanette Road.

Winds and saturation of the ground contributed to the damage, Owens said.

“(The storm) just kind of started on top of us and stayed on top of us,” Owens said.

Entergy Customer Service Manager Tim Runnels said at its peak, 200 customers lost power Saturday morning, mostly in the LaGrange area. The power was restored in most cases after approximately two hours, he said. Runnels credited the low number of outages to tree trimming Entergy did early this year to curb outages during storms.

“It was a non-eventful day, surprisingly,” Runnels said.

Tradewell said overflow from the creek completely damaged her fence, tossed a picnic table into a tree and wiped out the horse stalls.

“I can’t believe this — during (Hurricane) Gustav it never got this high,” she said.