Rain droplets collect on leaves of kudzu covering a hill off Washington Street as a rain shower passes over the Mississippi River in the background Tuesday. A storm system arrived in earnest before sunrise this morning.(C. Todd Sherman The Vicksburg Post)

[6/12/03]Rain poured, trees fell, cars crashed and the phones rang and rang at the 911 dispatching center this morning as storms moved through Warren County.

“With weather like this, it’s going to be a busy day,” Vicksburg Warren E-911 shift supervisor Peggy Sue Wright said soon after she and two others began work at 6. “We assume there are going to be a lot of wrecks, power lines down and flooding.”

Inside the basement of the Warren County Courthouse, dispatchers are buffeted from the outside sounds of rain, wind and thunder as they answer call after call of the trauma that comes with heavy rain, particularly when it’s time for the city to wake up and head to work.

By 7 a.m., .81 inches of rain had been reported at the Vicksburg Water Treatment Plant on Haining Road, 700 Entergy customers had lost power, trees were down in the city and county and at least three people had been injured in at least nine wrecks.

Dispatcher Lisa Buchanan reported 31 calls between 6 and 9 a.m., but dispatchers log only one call per incident.

“We’ve probably taken nearly 100 calls within three hours,” she said. An extra dispatcher had to be called in at about 8.

The first of the calls was a wreck at 6:41 a.m. when a car traveling west on Interstate 20 hit a pillar of the Wisconsin Avenue overpass.

The car, driven by Dianne Morris, 30, 20 Carroll Place Apartment K-6, hydroplaned and hit the bridge, Vicksburg Police Department patrolman Bobby Jones said.

Morris was being treated in the emergency room at River Region Medical Center later in the morning, a hospital spokesman said.

As the wreck information was being taken at the dispatching center, two other wrecks, both with injuries, were called in.

One was in the westbound lanes of Interstate 20 near the Big Black River and caused traffic to be rerouted from the interstate to Highway 80 for the second time this week. One person was injured and taken to a hospital by Hinds County officials.

Radio difficulties were another challenge dispatchers faced early this morning.

Lightning apparently struck the center’s tower, and dispatchers were using backup radios to communicate with city and county authorities until the problem was fixed, said Allen Maxwell, director of the communications center.

“It just makes it a little more difficult,” Wright said. “We just have to find another channel to contact them on.”

Maxwell said communication was not interrupted.

During the early-morning storms, about 700 Entergy customers along Drummond Street were out of power, said spokesman Cheryl Comans. The outage was a result of a tree tangled with a 13,000-volt distribution line. Service was restored to the majority of the customers by 7:40 a.m. and the remainder was expected to be on by 11 a.m., she said. The outage came after one Wednesday left 1,336 customers in south Warren County without power for nearly 12 hours.

A clogged drain this morning caused flash flooding near Sky Farm Avenue, Buchanan said. Flash floods were also reported on the I-20 frontage roads.

The Mississippi River was at 28.4 feet this morning and expected to be at 28.3 feet Friday, according to the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center. Flood stage is 43 feet.

Despite the stress of handling radio communications with the Warren County Sheriff’s department, Vicksburg Police Department, Warren County Emergency Management office, the National Weather Service and city and volunteer fire departments, the dispatchers remained calm.

Maxwell said the dispatchers are key to good emergency communication.

“You can write a check and buy all the equipment you want, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t have the right people,” he said.