By Billy Davis

Mississippi’s statewide burn ban remains firmly in place, unchanged after a wind-whipping thunderstorm rumbled through North Mississippi Tuesday afternoon.

“The ban is still on,” reported Daniel Cole, director of Panola County Emergency Management.

A countywide burn ban had been declared by Panola County government, and several municipalities, but that edict was superseded when Gov. Haley Barbour declared a statewide ban Oct. 6.

The storm pummeled portions of Panola County with straight-line winds that uprooted trees and snapped power lines.

Tuesday’s thunderstorm also suspended the record-breaking draught now lingering for a month and a half. The rains fell hard, especially in Batesville, but parched ground soaked up the precipitation.  

“All it did was make a little mud,” said Como Fire Chief Randy Perkins, who was fighting a hundred-acre grass fire, with six other fire departments, when the storm approached them west of Como.

Perkins said the fire started north of Highway 310, when a tractor was bush hogging. The tractor’s PTO shaft caught on fire, setting the dry field ablaze.

“It was called in as a tractor fire,” Perkins recalled, “and it had spread to 50 acres before the first fire truck arrived.”  

Firefighters from Como, Pleasant Grove, Sardis, Crenshaw, Sardis Lower Lake, and Batesville fought the fast-moving grass fire.

After the rains fell, Perkins said he was called to two different locations, on Fulmer Road and west of Como, to enforce the still-in-place ban.   

“They both thought it was lifted after the rain,” the fire chief said.

Batesville received the most precipitation from the thunderstorm. More than 1 ½ inches fell in the city, said a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Memphis.

At Sardis Lake, the field office there recorded six-tenths of an inch of rain, said a spokesman.  

The field office at Enid Lake fared worse, showing less than one-fifth of an inch.

The weather service spokesman said the thunderstorm formed near Stuttgart, Arkansas from an upper-level, low-pressure system. It dropped quarter-size hail at Helena as it moved southwest, he said.