Hurricane, Tornado & Ice Storm Assessment in Jackson, MS

Central Mississippi gets hit from three directions and each leaves a different mess. Inland hurricane remnants arrive with hours of sustained wind on saturated ground, which is what uproots whole pines rather than breaking them; Katrina proved in August 2005 that a storm can still be doing structural damage this far from the coast. Spring tornadoes cut narrow paths and leave trees twisted, partly uprooted, and loaded in ways that are genuinely hard to read from the ground. Ice is the least frequent and in some ways the worst — the February 1994 storm loaded central Mississippi's canopy until it came apart across whole neighbourhoods at once, and a loblolly stand under heavy glaze fails at the top rather than the base.

Our order of work does not change between them. Anything threatening life safety comes first. Then anything still holding load: a stem resting on a roof, a partly uprooted tree that is being held up by another tree, a limb suspended in a canopy over a walkway. Then access, then debris. A tree in contact with an Entergy or co-op line is not ours until the utility de-energizes and releases it, and we will say so rather than working near a conductor we cannot verify is dead.