North Mississippi senators pleaded for an improved disaster response from the state Thursday as thousands of their constituents still lacked power nearly three weeks after the January winter storm.
Sen. Rita Potts Parks, a Republican from Corinth, repeatedly told her colleagues “we have work to do” to better prepare for future disasters. Her district includes Alcorn and Tippah counties, two of the hardest-hit areas in Mississippi.
“I hope you remember how my people were cold, and we as a state, we failed them,” she said during an emotional speech on the Senate floor. “I’m included.”
In her district, hospitals and nursing homes went more than four days without power or water, Parks said.
“Can you imagine what those smells were like, what those cries were like by that second day?” she said. “And those people being placed with more and more blankets on them just to keep them warm.”
Parks and her colleague Sen. Neil Whaley, a Republican from Potts Camp, mentioned the response times of specific agencies as areas for improvement.
“Us getting resources from (the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) took days,” she later told Mississippi Today. “I’m not throwing darts, I’m just saying it was a fact we didn’t see supplies coming to us until Tuesday. That’s water, MREs, cots. This event happened on Saturday, Sunday. You’re Tuesday night, Wednesday getting us what we needed.”
She said about five or six counties went over two days without any power transmission because Tennessee Valley Authority lines were down. “That’s historical, that’s never supposed to happen,” Parks said.\
She and other senators spoke during discussion of Senate Bill 2632, which passed in the chamber. The bill, which now heads to the House for discussion, would create a “disaster recovery emergency loan program” to aid counties included in the recent federal disaster declaration.
Sen. Scott DeLano, a Republican from Biloxi who introduced the bill, said the state’s damages from Winter Storm Fern will likely reach $400 million. He described the proposed program as a “revolving loan fund,” meant to get public assistance money to counties and cities on the front end as they await reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Parks said FEMA payments to local entities could take anywhere from 18 months to two years. DeLano said Tennessee did something similar in response to Hurricane Helene in 2024.
While the bill doesn’t include a dollar amount, DeLano said the plan is to request $50 million in appropriations later in the session. Counties would have five years to repay the loans, and would also have to pledge a source of revenue in the event FEMA didn’t reimburse the funding. For any projects that FEMA rejects for reimbursement, local entities would have two years to repay the loan.
Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson, expressed concern that counties in those situations would be left on the hook for recovery spending. DeLano responded that lawmakers could use the two-year period to address any such shortfall. The state couldn’t offer the funding as a grant because it could be seen as a duplication of benefits, he added.
Whaley, who spoke after Parks, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I live in an area where the district lines of the Mississippi Department of Transportation meet, and for some reason that plow truck blade just would not stay on the ground when it got to that district line,” Whaley said.
The senator added that “a lot of things have to be answered,” and that he intends to bring “a lot of this out to light.”
Delano said later: “We are going to have a lot of discussion over the next year about how we better prepare for these types of events.”
About 1,700 Mississippians still didn’t have power as of Thursday afternoon nearly three weeks after the storm, according to poweroutage.us. That number, though, doesn’t include all electric utilities in the state. Northern District Public Service Commissioner Chris Brown said municipal systems, such as the beleaguered Holly Springs Utility Department, aren’t included. As of Thursday that system still had about 500 outages.
Another measure, House Bill 1645, would create state versions of FEMA programs as Mississippi officials prepare for reduced federal disaster support. That bill passed the House on Thursday and moves onto the Senate.
Other federal aid kicks in for recovering Mississippians
On Wednesday, the U.S. Small Business Administration announced low interest loans were available for certain private nonprofits in Alcorn, Bolivar, Calhoun, Carroll, Grenada, Holmes, Humphreys, Issaquena, Leflore, Montgomery, Sharkey, Sunflower, Warren, Washington, Webster and Yazoo counties as well as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Eligible organizations include, but are not limited to, food kitchens, homeless shelters, museums, libraries, community centers, schools and colleges.
Then on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a number of assistance measures for Mississippians, including a 90-day foreclosure pause for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. Click here for a full list of those measures.
Taylor Vance contributed to this report.
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