Southeast Missouri woke up to a thick blanket of snow — in some places, up to 8 inches of it.
Sean Poulos of the National Weather Service Paducah reported Butler County remained on the edge of the winter system, seeing between 3 and 4 inches of accumulation. Carter and other counties to the west and north received a much steeper 5-8 inches, sometimes within the same region.
As of 9:18 a.m., Ozark Border Electric Cooperative reported just over 1,100 customers lost power in Butler County, comprising 8% of their local customers. Outages hit 750 people in Wayne County, nearly 900 in Ripley and approximately 1,500 in Carter.
In Poplar Bluff specifically, Municipal Utilities reported three major outages — one due to a car hitting a pole, one from an overloaded breaker and the third from a pole breaking in half. As of 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, all outages were resolved.
“We’ve got to replace both those poles, but hopefully there’ll be no more outages today,” said Lyndell Coleman, Electric Distribution Superintendent.
Poulos said outages made sense given the nature of the winter storm.
“With the heavy, wet nature of the snow and 20-25 mph winds...we had several reports of trees down and a lot of power outages out there in Southeast Missouri,” he said.
Poulos noted a possibility of rain in counties north of Butler but believed they would remain outside the region.
“Our current forecast has it permanently staying north of the Poplar Bluff area. It would be primarily rain if it did fall this afternoon, and then it could change over to some light snow this evening, just to the northeast. We’re not expecting any accumulation,” he said.
Temperatures are expected to hover above freezing Wednesday and Thursday, dipping into the upper 20s overnight, before slowly rising to 50 on Saturday.
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