From staff reports

About 3,500 homes and businesses in Warren County remained without electricity this morning after a storm slammed the area late Saturday and early Sunday, knocking down trees and power lines.

“We’re hoping to get them all back on today, but it might be Tuesday,” said Don Arnold, Entergy’s customer service manager for Vicksburg.

The fast-moving storm hit Vicksburg and surrounding areas just after 11 Saturday night and rain continued intermittently through early Sunday afternoon.

Arnold said repair crews from Arkansas began arriving in Vicksburg at about 2 p.m. Sunday to assist in the work that the regular Vicksburg crew of 12 could not cover.

“If you’ve got a hurricane coming in, you know where to send the extra crews and have them ready,” he said. “But with a quick-moving storm like this, we couldn’t plan.”

At the height of the outage, about 4,800 customers were without power, Arnold said.

Among the most crucial affected sites were the 30-bed Claiborne County Hospital in Port Gibson and the City of Vicksburg Water Treatment Plant.

A generator kicked on immediately at the hospital, a spokesman said this morning, and normal service was restored at about 4 p.m. Sunday. The spokesman said no patients were affected.

At the treatment plant on E.W. Haining Road, Superintendent Pat McGuffie said power was out for 3 hours and 20 minutes, but the plant never lost enough pressure to affect the integrity of the city’s drinking water.

“Because the outage came when it did, during a time when there’s not big water usage, we had enough pressure to maintain.

“After Entergy got the electricity back on, we were pumping at 100 percent within an hour,” he said.

Delivery of The Vicksburg Post Sunday morning was delayed for a few hours because the plant on North Frontage Road was without power for nearly six hours, stalling the printing of the edition.

Across the city and county, about 30 trees were reported down and a few wrecks were caused by drivers losing control during the storm or vehicles running into fallen trees or limbs, a dispatcher for Warren County E-911 said this morning.

No injuries were reported.

One of the downed trees remained stretched across the driveway at Bowmar Elementary School this morning, but Vicksburg Warren School District Superintendent James Price said crews were on the campus at about 3:30, clearing the debris and the way for the first day of school. About 9,000 students in the district were expected for the first classes of the 2008-09 school year.

Across the state, 30,000 homes and businesses were without power for hours after the storm, but no injuries were reported.

In Mound, across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, a limb of a giant oak tree fell on the residence at 2965 Louisiana 602, a house that was built as the Mound Hotel in the early 1900s.

The owner, Rebecca Capps, said she moved to the home just more than two years ago after being displaced from Biloxi by Hurricane Katrina.

“I moved inland and thought I would be safe,” she said, “but this is not as devastating because I have been through this before.”

She estimated the damage to the house at about $200,000.