Newton County residents woke up on Friday morning to find everything nearly covered in white as the area received its first snow fall in several years.
After light rain fell throughout Thursday night and early Friday morning, the snow started and has not let up as of 10:30 a.m.
Temperatures dipped into the low 20s on Friday night and the snow didn’t start to melt until late Saturday morning.
County EMA Director Brian Taylor said two reported wrecks occurred on Decatur-Conehatta Road and I-20 on Friday but no injuries were reported.
Newton County Schools and Union schools were closed today and Newton Municipal School closed at 1:30 p.m. and all of the area basketball games scheduled for Friday were cancelled.
All the Kemper-Newton County Regional Library branches were also closed on Friday.
Thousands of homes lost electricity during the snow storm including many in Newton County, but most of the power outages in the county had been repaired by Saturday.
“We have a district office in Newton so we were able to work on those pretty quickly,” said Brock Williamson, communications coordinator for Southern Pine Electric. “In the Newton district’s area, Jasper County was hit the hardest. But Newton faired pretty well considering what we had.”
An estimated 13,500 Southern Pine customers lost power in the state on Friday, especially in areas south of Newton County.
“This was our second worst outage event that we’ve had in our cooperative’s history since Hurricane Katrina,” Williamson said. “At our highest we had just under 24,000 outages throughout our service territory and to be able to restore those in the time we were able to I think is a testament to our team and crew guys who were out there.”
Williamson said that the snow, which was measured at more than four inches in parts of the county, accumulated on tree branches, causing them to break and fall on power lines. Although no precipitation is in the forecast for this week, temperatures will remain cool with highs in the upper 50s and lows around freezing for Thursday and Friday.
