Between the Headlines: Columbus
Between the Headlines dives deep into the stories shaping Columbus and Lowndes County, Mississippi. Hosted by The Commercial Dispatch managing editor Zack Plair and local businessman and commentator David Chism, this show goes beyond the front page to bring you the real conversations behind local politics, policies and people. Zack’s journalistic expertise and David’s insight deliver in-depth analysis, spirited debate, and behind-the-scenes context you won’t get anywhere else. It's honest discussion on what matters.
Between the Headlines: Columbus
Matt Laubhan Discusses the Ice Storm PLUS MSMS Bills in Jackson
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The guys discuss Columbus' hopes of building out a regional crime center, even though Starkville has already made strides in that direction. They also tackle two bills in Jackson that could pave the way to MSMS opening its doors to high school sophomores.
From there, 4-County Electric’s Brian Clark and Jon Turner take us inside the week that snapped limbs, downed lines, and tested every mile of their nine-county footprint. They talk mutual aid, why a bucket at 40 feet is the coldest place in Mississippi, how restoration triage really works, and what you can do at home to cut peak demand and protect your neighbors from rolling blackouts. We also explore why winter is the true bill shock for a strip-heat South, and how free audits, blower doors, thermal imaging, and on-bill financing can make a real dent in your usage.
Finally, meteorologist superstar Matt Laubhan joins to break down the razor’s edge of this week's ice storm. He talks about how a single degree and a passing thunderstorm largely spared the Golden Triangle and gives us an update on the status of north Mississippi. He shares why his new 24/7 Mississippi Live Weather network went all-in early, how a distributed home-studio setup kept coverage online.
Welcome, Sponsors, Weather Tease
SPEAKER_00I don't know what he has come up with today to talk about.
SPEAKER_02I'm not asking you to hide anything. Yeah. You know, put it out there. Let the people see it.
SPEAKER_03I've never not worked in a hostile working environment.
SPEAKER_02You can't argue with anybody when they're putting facts in your face. Zach, that's a hard question.
SPEAKER_05I have no answer for it. From the opinion page of the commercial dispatch. This is Between the Headlines.
SPEAKER_04It's going to be a fantastic show this week on Between the Headlines. We've got Matt Lobham and we've got Brian Clark and John Turner of Ford County. And we'll also talk about some legislative asks of the city and of the Columbus delegation and some news on some bills for MSMS. But first. Retirement looks different for everyone, so your plan should be built around you. For over 40 years, Financial Concepts has helped people create retirement strategies that fit their lives. Our team in Columbus takes the time to understand your goals and build a plan that works for you. Wherever you are in your journey, we're ready to help. We plan retirement. Financial Concepts is a registered investment advisor. Benton's Maintenance Mechanical makes easy work out of plumbing, electrical heating, and air conditioner problems. You can book an appointment by phone or online, and rest assured they will show up at the appointed time. Call Bentons at 662-657-2583 or visit them online at Bentons Inc.com. That is BentonsINC.com. This episode of Between the Headlines is brought to you by Bank First, a bank headquartered right here in Columbus, Mississippi. That means your banking decisions aren't made hundreds of miles away by someone who doesn't know you. They're made here locally by bankers who know your name and care about the community. At Bank First, we're more than bankers. We're your neighbors. Whether we're cheering in the stands, catching up at a local pancake breakfast, or celebrating milestones across our community, we're part of the moments that matter most. Stop by your local Bank First branch or visit BankFirstFS.com to learn more. Bank First is a member FDIC and Equal Housing lender, Bank NMLS 454063. Welcome in today. You're listening to Between the Headlines. Managing editor and host for today is Mr. Zach Plair, and my name is Dave Chisholm. Zach, we really needed the bread and milk this week, didn't we?
SPEAKER_08Some of us did. We got awfully lucky here in Octavah and uh Lowndes County, though, especially compared to if you've seen the pictures of Oxford.
City Priorities: Lab Upgrade Over Crime Center
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Bad, bad times. We'll get into that. But first I want to ask you about uh some of the legislative asks. You were at the work session that was at Plymouth Bluff and the priorities of the city. Where do they stand?
SPEAKER_08Well, you know, they talked about it, uh, they talked about it at Plymouth Bluff at their retreat last week. Uh I was there for for that part of the discussion. They also uh revisited some of it at their work session uh Wednesday. An interesting thing, and and and really the thing that I want to drill down on for their legislative asks is for the last several years, the last few years, uh they have been trying to um, the city has been trying to get money, two million dollars, in fact, from anybody who'll give it to them, federal, state, both, whatever, to uh start building this Northeast Mississippi Area Crime Center. And uh what they were trying to do is they were trying to get very big brothery type stuff where you got you got the cameras out in town. Uh this is gonna be the monitor station where it is staffed, and they're using that, you know, they're using the surveillance and the monitoring hand in hand to prevent crime, help uh, you know, better prosecute crime, etc. I I I can tell you they were also gonna try to put the forensics lab under one roof uh with this place and kind of make the whole thing something that could be marketable to the region. This year, it looks like they're going in the direction of doing something a little different. Their number one priority is a mil it looks like they haven't passed their resolution yet. That's probably happening Tuesday. But um at yesterday's work session, it seemed very much like the number one priority was going to be outfitting the forensics lab with the uh with the equipment that it needs to get up to snuff entirely, replacing old equipment and then getting some new equipment that'll give them some new capabilities. And uh you know, and renovating the the strip mall to accommodate more space specifically for the forensics lab and making that their top priority, and that that NEMAC, that crime center, that area crime center is shifted down to a secondary priority. And uh I'm gonna tell you, I like that, David. I like that idea, and I've um um for some very specific reasons. But before I go into mine, what do you think about that?
SPEAKER_04Well, I mean, you you've got to process these drugs and and what all come into that building for the sake of adjudication and making things happen. Uh, a lot of it has to do with pill counting and pill weighing and all this kind of stuff. Uh, I mean, it's gotta happen. You can't do that if the computer is still running off of DOS and if you've got water coming in from the ceiling. So that's right. It's just gotta be done. But I'll tell you, there's a lot of people out there in Columbus and elsewhere that are just really starting to kick back and think, you know, the war on drugs is getting unreasonably expensive, and you just talk about the testing and the labs and the incarceration. And I mean, on the one hand, you you've got to have that, but um at what point does it does it become you know an albatross on the on the money record?
Forensics Capabilities And Regional Strategy
SPEAKER_08I'm gonna I'm gonna come at that this a different way because uh uh specifically the equipment that they're wanting, it's gonna uh replace old equipment that they already have um that that's aged out of usefulness, um if they get the money for identifying substances. But one piece of equipment that they're wanting is gonna let them quantify substances. Right now, if you want to know what something is, you can go there. Uh, if you want to know how much it is, you got to go to a different lab, private lab, do something else, um, spend more money. And if you want to be truly marketable to the region, to the area, to the state to try to, you know, help reduce backlogs, help generate revenue and all of that, you know, take care of home. Get that stuff going because you're already a good bit of the way there on your lab being viable for that. You're already got you've already got outside agencies. Well, if you make yourself more viable, you're gonna get more outside agencies, you're gonna get more business, you're gonna get more revenue. Now, looking at the other side of it, this crime center and the monitoring station and and all of that. And the includes cameras and stuff that yeah. So so you've got uh you you've got some some issues there. First of all, um as far as making that marketable to the area. You've got a uh police department uh twenty-five miles uh twenty-five miles west of here. Startville already has a good bit of this stuff built out. They uh it's it's not ready for prime time as a regional crime center, but they've got they've made the investments in the cameras, you know, without the legislature, did it themselves. So they've got the cameras, they've got the monitoring station, they were already manning that monitoring station 24 hours, and you know, and and there's already plans to for future expansion in the U.S.
SPEAKER_04So there's a blue and red light at every pole, it feels like it just does feel like that.
SPEAKER_08Also, so you've already got if the legislature's gonna invest in a place to make it a regional crime center, you've got to invest less money in a place that's halfway there than a place that is um, you know, you have to build from scratch. And, you know, if you're wanting to stand out, you've already got a forensics lab that is very much in the position as the monitoring operations center in Startville. You're halfway there. Make the investment in that. You've got your standout forensics lab in Columbus, you've got your standout regional operations center for the your your big brethren over in Startville, you've got both things in the golden triangle and you're not competing with each other.
SPEAKER_04The point of clarity on that, can Startville and Octibiha really help us over here with that system they've got going?
SPEAKER_08I mean, if it were to grow to a regional crime center, then yes. But I mean, what I'm saying is you've already got the you've already got the foundation there. You don't have to reinvent the wheel and build it from the ground up here. If you were gonna do that, and if I was the legislature, I would be looking at that uh quite uh gotcha quite closely.
SPEAKER_04Well, they'll probably ask how the jurisdictional issues will come into play.
SPEAKER_08Well, and and that's there's a lot of that that I I don't I don't know enough about to talk about. But I will say this too. You've also with this thing got you know obsolescence ten years down the road. Surveillance and monitoring is the is more and more the way people are going to invest their money in law enforcement in communities our size, the size of Columbus, Starble size of West Point.
SPEAKER_04As opposed to chasing them 100 miles an hour down College Street, get the tag number and get them later. Right. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Policing Tech, Staffing, And Obsolescence
SPEAKER_08One, efficiency, but two, hardly any of these departments are filling their uh filling their budgeted number of officers anyway. So uh you've got let's say you've got a budget for 55 officers, but you're averaging 40 to 42 officers actually being on staff and you've got high turnover and you hear about those officer shortages. Well, technology is gonna be the place where they start budgeting that money. What you're gonna see over the next 10 years, 15 years is these communities start drawing down the number that they're budgeting for. They're not reducing the size of their police force so much, they're just conceding the point that they're never gonna get back up to the number of officers that they used to need, and they can complement and supplement with technology that doesn't need benefits and uh insurance and PERS. So you're gonna see this organically happening in these communities more and more, and there's gonna be less and less need for a regional hub somewhere that's very expensive to manage and and that outside agencies are gonna use because most of these people are gonna be doing this at home. A forensic crime lab is always gonna be unique. And so I say you've already got it halfway there, get it there the rest of the way, and make that your make that your unicorn and and and don't try to do too much there because you might, you know, you might build something for two and four million dollars. It's obsolete in ten years.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, I definitely hear you. You've got to be efficient, you've got to be up with the times, uh, may even even throw AI in there. Um I know that gets controversial, but that's that's where a lot of things are. And I'm not talking about having robots watch us, you know, catching us speeding or whatever, but but just making the resources we have more effective and more efficient. I think um I think there's definitely some room for improvement there upon. But Zach, I I want to ask you about a a couple of house bills that are on the floor right now, um, at least introduced, and that is uh to do with the MSMS. Okay.
SPEAKER_08Your favorite subject.
SPEAKER_04Uh well it is, and I've uh full disclosure, I've got a son there, so part that's part the vested interest, but it's also a great thing for our community um and for all of those kids. And so what they're wanting to do, as I understand it, is do what they should have done a long time ago and make it its own independent thing. Yes. Uh get the university, MUW, out of there, so to speak, in terms of having books for this area and books for the university.
SPEAKER_08Put the teachers on contracts that'll be with the with the MSMS.
SPEAKER_04Yes, like like most schools do. And so if you do that, and then you begin to ask money from the legislature or from uh the feds for for upgrades and this and that, it's gonna be a lot easier to do, and I think it's gonna be uh a better procurement process because the right now the water is quite muddied the way the books are run.
SPEAKER_08And and I I agree with that totally, and I think that uh I I think that that's gonna be good. I think that that bill will go through. The thing that about the well the the Senate bill anyway, uh that I think maybe the House bill too, but uh what do you think about sophomores leaving home and living in Columbus on a re at a residential high school?
SPEAKER_04Well, that's a big deal, and of course, like everything, it's not without controversy. Um I don't think it's out of the question. I mean, I would I would trust my kids to go off and I mean it.
SPEAKER_08Would you could it could your son handle it?
SPEAKER_04My son could. Now some parents are gonna say no, that's just too much, and and that's their choice as a parent, but um uh the the school is safe. I think that the challenge for that is you still have the same number of classrooms out there and the same number of dorms. Uh I read in the dispatch that the dorms would end up being at max capacity, uh, which I believe that I don't see how they're gonna fit kids in the in the building right there for classes as it is, but I'd have to look into that more. So what that's gonna do if they open it up, it's is it's going to pressure the legislature even more to say, hey, those facilities.
SPEAKER_08We gotta have dorms and and and and I think that's a I think that's a good point. And I think that growth i is a good vanguard for MSMS against being messed with in the future.
SPEAKER_04Well, they ain't gonna mess with stuff. They like to do that, but there was an advisory board caveat to some of these bills, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_08Yes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they were gonna um basically put together an official advisory board. As opposed to just uh the ad hoc sort of thing that they're an actual arm of the legislative operations as opposed to just some people that are like, well, we like kids, we're gonna get together and we're gonna think of a new logo for the school, that type thing.
MSMS Governance Bills And Sophomore Debate
SPEAKER_08So well, you know, when you're when you're talking about the growth of MSMS, uh sophomores is the obvious place to go. The only question that I have, and I and I'm not saying it's a bad good thing or a bad thing, I'm just saying that my question that I would have for my own children, for for anybody else, you know, you're talking about you're 15 years old when you start 10th grade. Uh your 15-year-old mature enough to go live at a residential school in another community. Now, I understand the uh understand the the logic academically of getting them in earlier, getting them caught up, and getting everything levelized sooner, because if you're entering in the 11th grade and your public school district has not been great, and you're spending your whole 11th grade year catching up to your peers, and then 12th grade is really the only uh time that that that you are caught up. I uh you know, I can see where that would be a problem and how bringing in 10th graders would mitigate that some. However, is your 15-year-old mature enough to live away from home? I wasn't, and and I'll leave it at that.
SPEAKER_04Uh that's okay. I was, uh, and I'm not trying to let me let me rephrase that. I was an independent. You slap me in the face. Dude, dude, no, I'm not saying that in a positive way. I think I was more of a goody two shoes and I needed to live a little, honestly. But um uh the reason was I was raised by my granddad, and therefore I was just pretty dead gum independent to be that uh that old, you know, had a job. So it's not gonna be for everybody. Uh some will be more ready for it than others. But regardless, we'll keep our eye on this, see where it goes. Uh exciting development.
SPEAKER_02The Good for Business Podcast features interviews, tips, and tricks from owners, operators, and innovators. Hear the inspiring stories of growth and life lessons from guests in Mississippi and around the world. Hosted by entrepreneur, fundraiser, and real estate broker Colin Krieger. The podcast is based right here in the Golden Triangle community.
SPEAKER_04Next up in the studio, we are pleased to have the marketing manager for Fort County Electric, Mr. John Turner, and also a man of many hats, although his hair looks pretty good without one, actually. Uh the general manager of Four County, that is Mr. Brian Clark. Welcome to both of you guys. It's been a week, hasn't it? I tell you what, I did not realize until just uh this morning that then it was so bad we've had ten fatalities. Is that right? I I think yeah.
SPEAKER_06I did not know it was ten.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I I was completely unaware. So uh just tell us, are you guys okay? I mean, are you staying on top of all of this?
SPEAKER_06And yeah, driving over here getting ready for this, uh I said, John, pull up the outage map. And and John's words were, it is blissfully clear. Really? Yeah, if you're familiar with our outage map, that's just ours, right? Yeah. Uh so we serve parts of nine counties. When this thing hit uh Saturday night, early Sunday morning, it mainly impacted the west side of our system.
SPEAKER_08Right. How far west do y'all go?
SPEAKER_06We got over to Ackerman, where reform. Um John, is there another town on the other side of that?
SPEAKER_03I'm not thinking about almost to uh past Tom Nolan, a little below, and west of Tom Nolan almost to Kill Michael. So a little ways over there.
SPEAKER_08So so y'all had y'all had some bad stuff on the on the west side of y'all's coverage.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, if you look at really Choctaw County part of Webster, that's the most impacted. Uh when you got over there, it looked like a winter wonderland on Sunday, but not necessarily in a positive way. Right. Uh the trees, you can imagine they load up with ice. You've seen them. Y'all saw off seen North Mississippi Pictures. They lay down. Yeah, but we're we're so much more blessed than our sister co-ops across the state and the munis up north because we caught the edge of that. So even though we had 7,700 people out, we've got some of our sister co-ops that's got 70 and 80 and 90 percent of their meters out, 20,000 meters out.
SPEAKER_04So have you dispatched a large number of linemen to up north?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. So the way this works is we always take care of home first, right? Okay. So we got home buttoned up yesterday morning, sent the guys home at lunch to go see their family, their wives pack up. Uh this morning we shipped off 19 to uh Tippa County. They're on their way there now. And then this afternoon we're sending half a dozen or eight more guys to Prentice County.
SPEAKER_04And does the National Guard help you to get trucks in place and stuff? I mean, it just looks like I I'm not even trying to be funny, but Snow Mageddon in some places.
SPEAKER_06But the National Guard's a first for me. I've never had to use the National Guard where we're at. I've been here twenty years and I hope I don't have to. But they may need help getting across the highways. We talked to the Mississippi Patrol this morning. Feel like I twenty two is open enough for us to get down it. If not, the highway highway patrol is gonna help us. So I don't know about the National Guard. Hope we don't need them, but maybe they'll help move trees out of the way.
SPEAKER_04And some people are unaccounted for. Really? Yeah. It's it's wild.
SPEAKER_06Well, you know, I just encourage people to be safe with the lineman. It's it's a very dangerous job what they do. I understand there has been a lineman hurt in a part of the state.
SPEAKER_04Well, it's dangerous work. You don't get shocked from a power line, you get electrocuted from it. And and I saw an image on the internet also of uh someone who was I I suppose repairing a main generation line uh from a helicopter.
SPEAKER_06Was that a real thing? Yeah, TBA does that all the time. Those guys are highly skilled. You can probably go to YouTube and see some of that. The transmission lines are so tall, right? That it's more efficient for them to hire a highly skilled guy to hang off the helicopter and do his work and fly and go to the next piece. They'll even set poles with helicopters in some places. We don't do that here. Now we have people that say, hey, you need to lower my rates and get rid of your jets and your helicopters. We don't have any of that stuff here. We just have forward trucks and Chevrolet trucks.
SPEAKER_04Right. Well well that's fixed and the main lines are all back up as well.
SPEAKER_06Yes, TBA's telling us all the transmission lines are back up.
SPEAKER_08I want to back up to before the storm. We didn't know what the impact was going to be on our area. We were, you know, there were there were a larger chunk of the Ford County area that was, you know, the forecast said it could be bad, uh, you know, fully in Octavo County and some into lounge. When did y'all start preparing your guys and what does that look like? I mean, I I imagine that looks like getting ready for a deployment of some.
SPEAKER_06It does. So the good thing is with technology, you know, with WCBI's weather, with the commercial dispatch, with Matt Law Baum, when they start talking about it a week in advance, it's usually pretty bad, right? Right. So when we see that, even in the springtime, right, we start planning. Guys, do you have enough material? We got enough fuel. Uh notify your families. We don't know when we're going to be home, and we ramp up for it. Now, this is going to sound a little weird, but when this happens, it's it's a beautiful thing because the team works like a well-oiled machine. I mean, we have office staff that comes in and cooks around the clock for the guys, delivering food to the guys. And when you're out in the field and a little old lady's been without light for two or three days and it's freezing cold, and you cut her lights back on, and she gets emotional because it's the first sign of civilization. She hadn't seen it in a couple days, it's very impactful. And our employees thrive off that. It gives you a maybe an adrenaline rush or a sense of satisfaction in a job well done.
SPEAKER_08Purpose.
SPEAKER_06Yes. So to answer your original question, we plan days in advance to make sure we have everything we need.
SPEAKER_08Y'all had to deploy this out to a to a certain extent, but I mean, what's I guess the sense of relief, or is it a sense of frustration? Like, how does that how does that mix when it's like, okay, we're ready for the worst, and then eh wasn't quite as bad as we thought.
SPEAKER_06We're blessed we didn't get the worst. So first off, we're grateful, right? Second, we're very grateful and appreciated for our membership. If you look at the Facebook posts, people are praising our linemen and our staff, they're happy with Fort County, and it it's very satisfying knowing that. Now, what I don't want people to think is because Ford County did an excellent job and we got all our members cut back on in three days, and they look at the other co-ops, that is not a reflection of them. Right. They got hit worse.
SPEAKER_08Right.
SPEAKER_06We did not get hit as bad as they did. So we're we're blessed that we dodged a bullet.
SPEAKER_08Right. I've I've had people throw this stat at me in in different accumulations and different things. Uh but I have heard from different places over the past week that, you know, uh half an inch of ice on a power line is like 500 pounds or something. What's the actual metric on that and exactly how does an ice storm t take your power down?
SPEAKER_06Well, I'll caution, I'm not an engineer, and I don't I've I've heard the stats and I don't remember what they are. John may remember them. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03No, it's just the the more the worse.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. It's bad. And and it's like a domino effect because once the weight of that first one surpasses what the pole can handle and it breaks, then it's they just all start breaking in a line. Because as you can imagine, the the weight compounds to the next pole.
SPEAKER_08And then you gotta wait for the uh wait for the storm really to pass before you can really do much.
Four County Electric Joins: Storm Overview
SPEAKER_03And the other difficult thing that is for for ice-related stuff is how cold it is. Look, people aren't built to be out there, and especially guys down here in the south. Now, most of the our guys have the right stuff, they've got the right equipment, and they will wear their hunting stuff when they need to, and all that. And you know, so though sitting in a shooting house though is a lot different than being out there 16 hours up and down poles, wet, cold. You don't have a break. And when that goes on day after day after day, that's difficult, right? That is really, really difficult. And I I would argue that that cold weather restoration like that is more difficult than hot weather restoration.
SPEAKER_06And there's a couple things I'd like for you to hear that that most of us don't realize. I don't think there's a colder place in the state of Mississippi than 40 feet up in the air in a bucket truck without ice. So those guys are cut out of a different cloth. And I want you all to realize this too. Uh north of Ackerman, where where all the ice was and those trees were bending over the roads, we were out there and we were cutting trees out of the road the whole time other trees are falling. So that's why at night sometimes we just call it off. It just gets too dangerous.
SPEAKER_04Right. Right. Well, let me ask you this. I'm always about preparedness. Did we have enough poles? Did we have enough wires?
SPEAKER_06So in this instant, now every storm is different. In this one, we only had about 15 broken poles. Most of it was tree, put the wire on the ground, we have to cut the wire, re-splice it, rehang it, the poles still there. We didn't have many broken poles in this one. But yes, we had plenty of material.
SPEAKER_04That thing stretched, if I recall, from Texas all the way up into New England. It was such a weird thing. It was colder in Mobile, Alabama than it was in Juneau, Alaska, if you can believe that. And so thinking about the nationwide supply, do you think our friends up north are are going to have enough to get everybody back and going?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, there's a there's a big contractor base that works in the electrical field, and they're all over the place. You know, people will drive all over the country, and co-ops do it, right? I know we're helping sister co-ops in the state of Mississippi, but we've sent crews all the way up to New Jersey before to help, right? That's just what the co-ops do. There's 900 electrical co-ops across the United States, and this is the core foundation of what we're built on as we help each other.
SPEAKER_04Well, what about brownouts and things like that? I remember, I think it was two years ago. Yeah, I remember it. It sounded like a sore spot that I made.
SPEAKER_06It is a sore spot.
SPEAKER_04So it's well tell me about it. Or are we do we have enough juice that that hopefully we'll be able to avoid that or rolling blackouts?
SPEAKER_06Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2023 will go down in the history books of when we had to contact our members and say, guys, uh TVA doesn't have enough generation, they've lost some. And in order to protect the entire grid, we're gonna take 30-minute increments and do rolling blackouts. And we did it. And it wasn't fun, it wasn't easy, and I hope we never have to do it again.
SPEAKER_08Certainly wasn't popular, I know.
SPEAKER_03No, it wasn't popular. And that was the first time in the 90 plus year history of TVA that that had ever had to happen.
SPEAKER_04Well, and and and correct me if I'm wrong here, but is it because we had power outages that we didn't have to do that this time?
SPEAKER_06I mean, because we didn't lose the generation we lost then. And when I say we, I mean the Tennessee Valley. The whole thing a lot of those plants are built for extreme heat. They weren't designed for extreme cold to that magnitude. And when that extreme cold came in, it tripped a lot of breakers in those big plants, which historically would not have been a bad issue except the entire country was feeling that. When when TBA goes through that, they have arrangements outside of their footprint to buy power from other providers. Well, when your neighbor needs their own sugar, they don't give you any. That's kind of what TBA ran into is their plants tripped, but then they couldn't buy it from their neighbors and they didn't have enough.
SPEAKER_04Is there anything the consumers could have done a little differently? I mean, uh other than you know, how that's I'm not turning my house down to 65 degrees, but maybe like small things space heaters that just chew up the wattage.
Outages, Mutual Aid, And Safety Risks
SPEAKER_06Listen to what we put out there in the media. We we don't just do it for lip service. We say lower your thermostat, wear a coat, right? Don't run your dryer midday. You know, spread this load out. And when we do it at home, my wife will ask me, Brian, are other people really doing this? I hope they are so we can mitigate the grid. But TVA's made some huge investments since then to hopefully this will not happen again.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they're just folks around here that do not want to be like California per se.
SPEAKER_08Well, I want to take this down to a consumer level though. Um I know that a lot of people are worried, and not just in Ford County, but a lot of people all over the state, really all over the country, they're worried with this extreme cold, what they're getting in the mail. And I mean to the extent that y'all can brace your customers and also maybe advise on uh those types of mitigations that you can do right now to to maybe make up for it later.
SPEAKER_06I'd like to talk about that in a broader scope, if you don't mind. Okay. So we're a not-for-profit electric cooperative, but we have to continue to have expenses to keep things running efficiently. An example of that is we spend$4 million a year on right away. We cut thousands of trees. It pays off in these storms. If we truly did things at the absolute lowest cost, we would wind up paying for it later. So I'm saying we we have a lot of investments. We look at our rates compared to other co-ops in the valley, and we're exactly where we need to be. We're right in the middle of the road. We're not we're not investing too much, we're not neglecting our system. So I want members to know, first of all, you have a good co-op that that is managed well. I know that's self-serving me saying that, but it really is on all the metrics that we're looking at, the investments we have protect the members. And it's so we protect it during storms.
SPEAKER_03Okay. But to your point, Zach, so there are, yeah, and and oddly enough, for a mid-Mississippi located cooperative utility, we are a winter peaking system, and that's because so many folks have what we call strip heat, right? Yeah. Straight electricity. Straight electricity coming through there. And unfortunately, that is the most expensive way to eat your home. But there's a lot of it out there. And then when you get these extended cold snaps like this, I mean people are trying to survive. We get it. You can keep your your thermostat on 65 or 60, and it's still gonna run all the time because it's just so daggum cold out there.
SPEAKER_06I think the part that hurts, though, is when you when you go to the grocery store, you can tally up what you're paying for, you know what it is. When you go at the gas pump, you know what it is. You don't know what it is until you get your go read your meter and do the calculations of what the bill's gonna be. But if you look at everything related, we did this a couple of years ago with inflation and milk and groceries and gas, the electric industry has not gone at the same pace as everything else has. It's still a bargain.
SPEAKER_03And and we also have a lot of tools out there now for folks to get daily reminders of what their daily price points to Brian's point to try to educate them on the front end so that even though there's nothing you can do about it in times like this, at least you've got a budget idea of what's going on. We started a prepay, you know. There's notifications they can sign up for working, sign up for boardings, notifications where we tell them how much they've used in a day or if they've used a in a large amount of power. Uh and we've got free audits. I've got a crack team of guys, and I'm not just saying that, uh, that go out and and and we'll walk through your house and and help you find ways that either no cost, low-cost ways to try to, you know, enter uh make your home more energy efficient, but also we've got several programs. We've got own bill financing for uh HVAC and energy efficiency stuff. We we have some some other lower income programs, we've got a lot of things out there that we try to, you know, educate and help. Because to Brian's point, having that knowledge is probably the most important thing.
SPEAKER_04You know, so do you do the infrared stuff to see what's not insulated with the other? We have that. So we've got that.
SPEAKER_03We've got what they call blower door tests where we check for that envelope and you know leakage and all those things. And and really uh, you know good. Uh it's good that uh you can do a lot of things with just some simple weatherization, right?
SPEAKER_04Wind stream. A crazy hack. When the kids take a bath, I leave that hot water in the tub for like two hours and it heats the bathroom as opposed to sending that energy down into the septic tank where it does. I really thought you were going somewhere about it.
unknownI did too.
SPEAKER_06But I do the same thing with the oven. If we used it to cook a pizza when it's done, I open the door and let the heat come out into the room.
SPEAKER_03Well, you know, and it goes back to like my dad, who, you know, you didn't touch that thermostat, you just put on more clothes and shut up. And close the door.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. We're turning into our fathers, aren't we?
Preparing Crews And Community Response
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Uh last thing I want to ask you guys, uh sort of uh pivoting to the larger picture of just power in this area. Uh you were talking about TVA usage. Uh you know, the type, I think two uh TVA power users are right here. Or are two of y'all's users. So um, you know, uh looking at the industrial part, looking at the development over there, looking at the potential for Cynco, how how are y'all involved with that? What does that mean for you guys? How could the impact of that campus growing like it is, uh, what kind of impact positive and negative could it have on the rank and file customer?
SPEAKER_06So Fort County's impact is is a few ways. One, we're heavily involved in economic development. We make a lot of investment in substations and wires to get these plants to come here. And look, we're we're very proud of the fact that SDI and ADI is number one and number two in all of the Tennessee Valley. You would think with a name like TVA that the largest load would be in Tennessee. It's in Mississippi. So we make those investments and help, and TVA's been really good in our area. I don't know that we brag about that enough. TVA's made a lot of investments in our area to prep for this, not only what's already here, but what may come in the future. If you go to West Point, that substation in West Point uh does not naturally occur across the country. Right. TVA's made a lot of investment there and they're prepping us for the future. Y'all know about the Caledonia plant, the 500 megawatt plant that'll be online in what, a year and a half, two years? All that's attributable to everything going on in our area.
SPEAKER_08But I mean, I guess w with that power usage, with those big power users coming to the area, uh does it have an impact on you know your residential customer out in New Hope or in the U.S.
SPEAKER_06Well, from a rate standpoint, no, right? And from a power standpoint, I'd say in a positive way because it gets TBA to invest more in our area, right?
SPEAKER_08Okay. Was there uh anything you guys want to add?
SPEAKER_03Now we just appreciate you guys having us on to talk about this, and and we appreciate all our members. Yeah. You know, they have lifted us up over the last week.
SPEAKER_04And as a member though, let me ask you this right on that. Is there anything we can do other than just say add a boy?
SPEAKER_03Or our lineman hit on it earlier. Just pay attention to the signals that we give you when we say voluntarily cut your power down. We're not doing that as he said, just for lip service. There's a larger, you know, uh uh thing there. So go ahead and participate, do the stuff that you can, get involved, you know. Uh we'd like to hear from you, good or bad. Yeah, we don't know, we can't fix it, and we can't give people an out of boy if we don't know that. So reach out to us. We're we're right.
SPEAKER_06We can't brag enough on our staff. Yeah, we're blessed with good people. And they live in all the communities we serve. We've got an environment there of I I would call it servant leadership, where we we love to serve other people, and we've got a really good team. Y'all, y'all probably know a lot of people that work there, and you see that when we wear this logo out in public, people are appreciative. Uh, people came out of the woodworks in this storm like I've never seen before, wanting to cook food and give stuff to the linemen and do this, to the point that we had to tell some people, thank you, but we we've already got enough food for right now, but thank you very much.
SPEAKER_08I saw where y'all got some CJs.
SPEAKER_03That's right. They came in on their day off. Yes, maybe off.
SPEAKER_06Good people.
SPEAKER_04Very, very cool. Well, our guests for this segment have been Mr. John Turner and Mr. Brian Clark. Thank you, gentlemen, for being in here today. Thank you. Thank you. The commercial dispatch garage sale is coming up Saturday, February 7th. Tools, unique pieces of art, vintage items, bulk supplies, office supplies, office furniture, and much more. The dispatch isn't going anywhere. We've just cleaned out the closets February 7th from 7 to noon at 516 Main Street in Columbus. We are pleased to have on the Josh Gillis phone line today Mr. Lophan, Matt Lophan, who is the chief meteorologist and founder of Mississippi Live Weather. He used to work for WTVA, now he's gone independent. And this just in the commercial dispatch is pleased to announce that uh Mr. Lophan will be serving the paper for our local weather. And so that's that's quite festive. We've got the weather guide of North Mississippi putting the weather in our local paper. So hats off to you and welcome to the show today.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you for having me. Glad for the opportunity to partner with, you know, uh a news source in you know Mississippi that's been here for a very, very long time and has such established trust and just very humbled to be a be able to help uh partner with you guys.
SPEAKER_08Well, we we appreciate having you. And uh so I I want to start now. You're still living in Tupelo, right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. Living uh we live just north of the city of Tupelo, right off of the Natchez Trace, pretty much. Uh back in COVID, we built one mile away from the TV station because we were never leaving. And well, we're still never leaving, but it's a longer commute to work some days when I'm not from the home studio.
SPEAKER_08Well, now I see that you have lights behind you. Do you have a generator or do y'all have power back?
SPEAKER_01So we are fortunate enough that we got power back about 24 hours into things, we got power back. But we had backup battery and solar installed when we when we put the house in because I knew at some point we would have an ice storm, and then I have an electric truck. I have the F-150 Lightning, and so that then has a 10 times bigger battery than our backup battery for the house. And so when the ice storm hit, we had cords running all over the place in the house, and we were running off the truck.
unknownOkay.
Ice Loads, Restoration Realities, And Supply
SPEAKER_04Well, that that sounds like a tough deal for you guys up there, and of course we'll get into that, but we do thank you for largely sparing Lowndes County. I mean, we've got it pretty good here compared to, you know, let's say the people in Oxford. It looks bad. I heard that old Miss is gonna be yet another week out of school. Is that true?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I believe it's the 8th of February, is where they're targeting now. And it's not just that they're out for that large a chunk of time, it's that they know now that they need to be out for that large a chunk of time. That just tells you the extent of the severe damage there. We we talked uh over the weekend how Lowndes County largely won the lottery on this one here, about as about as fortunate as you're gonna. Come out on one of these. But it but it's really, really bad. I mean, I would say still as of uh midweek, the first week after the ice storm, uh there are people that are still to a certain extent unaccounted for because they're just so far off in the in the woods in Tippah, in Benton, in Alcorn, uh Tishmingo, and Lafayette counties there. So it's um it's a rough go, certainly the roughest ice storm of this century, and um, you know, uh unfortunately has turned into a ham humanitarian issue that hopefully gets resolved soon.
SPEAKER_08Well, uh uh talk a little bit about that. I mean, road conditions up there. I'm seeing pictures, they're still it's still pretty, it's still pretty dicey in some places. No, they had whole sections of interstates closed uh as recently as yesterday, I think. Um and and so talk about the travel problems, talk about uh uh the humanitarian part and and what you guys need up there and who needs it.
SPEAKER_01You know, we need power, but that's that's not as simple as the happening, right? The delivery mechanism has been crippled by by this ice storm. You know, every single we we don't it's one of those things. Electricity is the thing that we just take for granted. It's going to be there. You flip the switches there. This phone I'm talking on, if it doesn't have electricity, it doesn't work. The water coming in the house, if the pumps provided to that don't allow electricity, you're not getting water into the house. If the pumps providing the natural gas don't have electricity, it's not getting into the house. Um there's just so many flip a switch, and it's their things that fall apart when electricity is not available. And one of the things that hurt is that for the first couple of days, TVA transmission lines, not just the local power cooperatives or the line coming the street to your house, but the main lines coming from the Tennessee Valley Authority were crippled because they were knocked down because of trees and other reasons with this ice storm. Those have largely been restored, meaning at least the local power cooperatives are able to deliver the electricity, and now it just becomes the arduous task of going and putting up every single pole, cutting away every single fallen limb, flipping the switch, and then it messes up someplace else, and it just takes a long, long time to recuperate from all that. So that then has its own impacts on the humanitarian side because you have people that are, you know, they they love their rural location, but it may not be something, you know, you get far enough out in the woods, it's hard to build a site-built house there. So we have a lot of manufactured homes that tend to, especially older ones, tend to be a little bit less uh well insulated, um, that are just kind of out in the middle of nowhere, that that these people are very, very cold. And um trying to get to these people, I've talked to some certain emergency managers in parts of you know, Tippah County uh uh and other other locations, and they've had a hard time getting to all the people that have called saying they need help. Um they're trying to do that, but you know, if the road is covered in limbs, still is icy, uh they've had to in some case go off on foot to try to try to bring people in. And those are the people that still have enough power in their cell phone to be able to make a phone call. Um so I told my wife, and I do not like my predictions coming true. That means if I'm saying tornadoes for you, I'm always praying against myself. I'd rather throw it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, tornadoes a bad day in your office.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I mean it's so in this case, though, a prediction, unfortunately a dire one I made to my wife this last weekend is I looked at her right after that I stopped and I said, if ten people die, this will have been an amazing, amazing recovery effort. Unfortunately, we're at 10 people at this point here, and I'm really concerned that that number could go higher. Um every life lost is critical and awful. It's just um it was very obvious very early on that recovery was not going to go as swiftly as as probably needed. Uh and that's just because the it it's hard to get to these people. Um it's such a large-scale issue. And in talking to emergency managers, they talk about how you know tornado damage is bad, but it's usually a concentrated path.
SPEAKER_08Right.
SPEAKER_01This is tornado-like damage over entire counties.
SPEAKER_08Wide swath, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's really hard to get your brain wrapped around that.
SPEAKER_08Well, and and to that end, Mississippi live weather is but relatively new. I mean, y'all are what months into your existence at this point?
SPEAKER_01About six, seven months in. I've stopped counting, but about seven, probably eight months in close to that.
SPEAKER_08Well, um, so I mean, this was really the first opportunity for you guys to to stretch your legs on a something this cataclysmic over this widespread of an area. Uh talk about what that was like for y'all and how y'all kind of prepared for that.
Grid Stress, TVA, And Consumer Steps
SPEAKER_01You know, we had a very good idea by Tuesday of last week that this is going to be probably a pretty impressive ice storm. Um we started, you know, banging the drums saying, hey, gotta pay attention. This is something, we're really watching this, you know, it looks like odds are good. But um, you know, so in the lead up to that, you know that if you cover it correctly, you have the opportunity to prepare as many people as possible. You also expose yourself to a greater amount of criticism if it doesn't happen. But this one became pretty clear that the negative impacts of not warning the public were greater than the negative impacts of, oops, we were wrong, uh, this is bad. But I can't say it wasn't stressful, knowing that this was, I've told my crew from the beginning, we had the launch, which was very, very good, and then we would have the relaunch when we had the first severe weather or winter weather event. And for the relaunch, as as we put it, to have been the most impactful ice storm this century for the northern part of the state, and to uh certain extent, talking to emergency managers, more impactful than the 94 storm, which is the benchmark on record. The power outages might not be as long as the 94 storm in some cases, but in some cases this day will be longer. Um, that is not at all what I think we expected, kind of leading into this. So we have the ability. I mean, I am in my home studio at this point here. We have a studio in downtown Tupelo at the Renaissance Center for Ideas, um, and then a studio in Senatobia where my morning meteorologist lives and works out of. Um, but I realized we were gonna have to split everybody and put them at their home location because if we're gonna tell people at home, don't leave your house, and then we leave our house, it's like it can't be that bad because they're out doing the thing. So I spent a lot of last week trying to get people, get my my evening meteorologist of the equipment so he could broadcast from home, my weekend meteorologist of the equipment so he could broadcast from home, so that we would be able to continue coverage if and when multiple people went offline. I think at peak, two of the thr two of the four of us, you know, were completely lost uh because of because of power outages and internet internet issues. Uh, and then um I I flickered, but we were okay. My morning meteorologist, who's in Starkville there, he was just fine. I'm seeing my weekend meteorologist.
SPEAKER_08Well, and I want to talk about Starkville a little bit because that's where I live. And I Tiball County was kind of on the bubble of this. They really on the edge of where this thing was either going to be uh nasty or hardly anything. And you know, you look at Webster County, Webster County got hammered compared to Octavall County. But uh the one thing that I noticed, and uh and I'll be honest with you, uh y'all's were more accurate than the others, the other models that I saw, but we were still on that edge the whole time, and it was very unclear whether it was gonna happen, when it was gonna happen, and then you know, it happened 15 miles west of us hard, and it happened where we were not at all. What was there to that that w on the edge of that front where it was very unclear whether or when anything was gonna happen and forecasting that, what was the difficulty there?
SPEAKER_01One of the challenges we face are high impact, low confidence events, right? And so an ice storm at the changeover between rain and ice can be very low confidence as to exactly where that line is. You're at 33 degrees, it's all rain. You're at 32, it's probably icing, and you're at 31, it's all ice. And right at that line, in this case, we knew we were gonna have thunderstorms. And so those thunderstorms at that line, just like any thunderstorms, can leave you with half an inch of rainfall. And you know this in summer, you're in your neighbor that's, you know, half a mile down the road gets absolutely nothing. So now you're adding this component of heavy precipitation right along the edge of where the freezing line is, and that's how you have Webster County that had some significant icing impacts there, and you have Octibaha County that some parts of the county did, other parts did not, because if that thunderstorm occurred when the temperature was 31, boom, it's all ice. If that thunderstorm occurs when the temperature is 33, it's a cold rainfall, what's the big deal? And so only God has any clue exactly how that's going to line up. And so we knew that there was a high potential that if those thunderstorms were on the cold side and that cold line was even just a little farther south and east, that's where Octibaha County gets it. But Webster County, again, farther northwest, more likely to be cold, odds are greater. We felt more comfortable with the likelihood of significant icing there. And so it just all lines up to exactly where that surface freezing line is. And one of the funny things is new research shows that, you know, you put thunderstorms in there, and that can actually somewhat boost the temperatures a little bit. Uh it did not help some folks that were just barely cold enough, but I think it did kind of to a certain extent save you guys in Octibaha County and parts of Octabaha County from being worse because those thunderstorms actually took the temperature up about a degree. Right and that really saved y'all.
SPEAKER_08Was there any point in in the period up leading up to or during that ice storm where you were thinking, God, I wish I had waited eight more months to not have a network behind me?
SPEAKER_01No, not not at all. Um and this is this is not to knock or or say anything against any any other uh any other entity. But I the benefit of doing this is I don't have to worry about corporate anything any place telling me that we can't buy this. Like I have to look at the bottom line at the end of the month, I don't have enough money, we've got problems. But I know that you know how much money is there, and so if I know I need a piece of equipment, I can immediately go out and get it, and I can put the pieces of parts together to be able to be resilient in this situation. So there were things early last week I started ordering and shipping to the people so that everybody had what they needed at their house to be able to pull this off. Uh when I was in the TV station, yeah, that that was not something that we could do. Um so not at all. I would say that this allowed me to be that allowed us to continue broadcasting when frankly there were problems that happened at the TV station uh that kept them from broadcasting. That I would have been broadcasting on Facebook Live on my phone either way. This way we were able to do it with the right equipment and the right distribution so that we were able to inform as many people as possible.
SPEAKER_04Okay. I tell you what though, Matt, we are spoiled in terms of uh the gadgetry and the technology. I I just think about how back in the day um the the models and everything were just not up to date. We had a guy that called him Lion Bryan. Bless his heart. Listen, none of that was his fault. He just didn't have the technology that we did. So for all of those out there whining about, well, that line was not coming through our city like you said it might, I just think they're not in touch with reality, so hats off to you. Well, he's from here.
Bills, Winter Peaks, And Home Efficiency
SPEAKER_01I can firmly tell you that this was the best high impact forecast of my career, and it's not even close. We've called some big ones before, you know, with the 2011 tornado outbreak, with the 2014 tornadoes at Y'all in Columbus and up here in Tupelo, uh, then there are other instances where we've done it. I am more proud of our forecast of this ice storm and the preparation it gave people than anything that I have forecasted before. And I'm not just saying that because I'm independent and all this stuff. Like, we grabbed a hold of it very early, and I got to give credit to God on that for whatever reason. You know, occasionally I'll get this feeling, and he says, you know, like you should go with it. And I explained it to a friend. I was like, um, if you ever watched Ocean's 11 and you, you know, Danny Ocean talks about uh the fact that uh in life the house always wins unless you get that one big hand. And when that one big hand comes, you bet big and then you take the house. And I looked at it on this, and I looked at it on Tuesday, and I said, this is gonna be it. We've got to go all in on this uh because this is as impactful a weather event as I've covered in my 15 years in Mississippi. And as we talk, as we record this, more than 100,000 Mississippians still don't have power, which is a lifeline in so many different ways. And we've had not record setting cold, but extreme dangerous cold. Uh so all of that to say, uh I feel very blessed that my team and I kind of went in on this. And it's incredible. You talk about, you know, Lion Bryan, uh Dick Rice, who's who preceded me uh here in Tupelo, would talk about his relationship he and Brian had, you know, and he had his instances where it's not gonna snow and there's snowfall in the sky cam behind him. But they had a fraction of a percentage of the equipment and um and technology that we have nowadays. They had plenty of knowledge and would have done just as good with what we have now. Uh we're just blessed to have all that at our disposal.
SPEAKER_08Talk to us a little bit about Mississippi live weather, how it started, why it started, uh how to get it, and how how you guys are making money.
SPEAKER_01So it started I kind of lost my job a year ago and then unlost my job. And in the process, that kind of shook my world because I had always joked. I said, well, I mean, you know, outside of cursing and nudity on TV, I'll probably keep my job around here. I feel like I'm pretty safe. And then there was a third thing, which was, you know, uh, you know, uh nationwide, you know, dynamics in the television industry that I had not considered. And so at that point it really shook me. I said, okay, well, what does what's next look like? I spoke to a person by the name of Ben Luna up at Tennessee Valley Weather in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. He brought me up to his place. He has five meteorologists, I think, uh, 18 people working for him in a building that they, you know, paid off themselves in a town of basically 10,000 people. And I said, if you can pull this off here, any company can pull this off someplace else. And it's harder than that because he's an amazing person, but he really figured out and cracked the code on this idea of 24-hour weather channel delivery, the delivery method of the app and other things, and just, I mean, had some great ideas that I largely copied. So we took it, you know, a step further immediately, launching with a full team back in July of last year. Uh, and it's allowed me to kind of bring on high-quality folks from around the area. My morning meteorologist, she worked for me at the TV station for a while, she worked in Memphis for a while, and then she had a baby. And I'm gonna guess most of us have wives or girlfriends, you know, who have dealt with, now I have a child. How are we going to balance work and raising a child? And in her case, her husband's a preacher, she was going to be a stay-at-home wife, and she was gonna give up her career. We saw it on Facebook, I messaged her, I was like, You're the perfect person to be my morning meteorologist. I will build you a studio in your house. And that's what we did. And she's like, It's my dream job. If her baby starts crying, she can go in another room, take care of it. I don't care if she brings her on camera, like, and deals with it. Life happens, and the end user at home understands that. I mean, if we're used to beauty queens or random girls standing in front of their mirror with the toilet in the background taking selfies of themselves, I think they'll take a crying baby coming on TV, right? Um, so it's just, I think it's a more real, it's a more real-time way to get a hold of people. And one of the cool things we've been able to do in this post-i storm is, you know, Mayor Robin Tannehill from from Oxford called me the other day, and she's like, hey, we need people to stop dripping their water because that we're having water pressure issues. I said, Can you go on now? She said, Yeah. Within less than five minutes, we had a live stream up. We were telling people at home that they needed to stop dripping their water. That is the next generation of TV. And I didn't realize it a year ago, but it was already here. And for the last few years, I've been trying to convince myself that television would be viable when I was 65. I'm in my mid-40s. That meant 20 more years of television being viable so I could retire from television. And once I got on the other side, it's like, oh, this has been here. This is what people are doing. And so the future is now.
SPEAKER_08Okay. Well, I mean, I know you got some seed money to get started. Uh how does that how does that revenue stream uh sustain you guys, like in in this sort of new world of 24-7 local weather broadcasts?
Industrial Load, TVA Investments, Local Impact
SPEAKER_01So so I was fortunate that it's all loans, but I was able to get a loan from uh the folks over at Three Rivers Planning and Development. Um, the CDF Community Development Foundation up here in Tupelo put me in front of the right people at the right times, and I gotta give them major credit on that because I'm not a business person, I'm a meteorologist. Um and but they put me in front of the right people at the right times, helped me put together a business plan so that we could get this off of the ground. We are advertising based, uh, and so that means we have to have enough advertising to cover the bills, kind of like you guys. Um and so that has been difficult initially because there are some people, we we've had a tremendous amount of people reach out, but there has been a little bit of sticker shock for some folks saying, wait, it costs that much. But in this previous ice storm here we're coming off of, in the last week, we've had over a quarter million hours of viewership across our different platforms. Um that's a lot of eyeballs for a long period of time. Uh and that is, frankly, in some cases, better than TV station eyeballs. So people come in expecting the advertising to be next to nothing, but we're bringing in T V station eyeballs for you on live content. And for years, weather has been the number one draw of the television. And well now, uh here we go. So uh it has worked. Um we are paying pretty much paying the bills. I'm interested to see what my internet bill is gonna be from this last month because uh at the peak of the ice storm, we were drawing down four terabit terabytes of data per hour. And so we were on pace to uh use up almost half a petabyte of data this month. Uh would be five hundred terabytes, which would be five minut five, I can't remember how many million uh I think that's five. That's a lot. Big numbers.
SPEAKER_08Well, just real quick, tell us how to access uh Mississippi Live Weather.
SPEAKER_01So the easiest way to do it, you know, we have a Roku app, Apple TV app. You just search for Mississippi Live on those platforms, you'll find it. If you go to the app store, just search for Mississippi Live Weather on whatever your device is. You can find us there, we're on YouTube, we're on social, we're on all that kind of stuff. Um but the app is the easiest way because the cool thing about it is is you pull it open, our 24-7 live streams at the top, and if we are on a live broadcast, the first thing you see at the top of the screen is us live there. And it's simple. It's no more, hey, is Matt and the crew live for severe weather? You open it up and it's right there. So search Mississippi Live and in particular Mississippi Live Weather in the App Store, and you'll find us.
SPEAKER_04Well, Matt, we are so fortunate to have you today. Uh we celebrate with you uh in terms of uh what you've got going. Going there. One thing I have to ask before I let you go, did you ever make amends with John?
SPEAKER_01Here's the thing about John. John and I never realized that that was a thing until later on that night. Because John was around a corner, around another corner, the TV station couldn't hear me. And that's again one of the reasons I'm so glad we did this. Because that situation never happens if the station had properly staffed it that night. I'd asked management, we need folks there, and they'd give me two people, never done severe weather before, and John and I. And so John's over there trying to teach people what to do, and a tornado warning I think comes out for Pontak County. And I know I have drunk kids on Super Bulldog weekend with a tornado coming toward them that I can confirm, and now a new tornado warning for someplace else. I'm not leaving those drunk kids unless I'm sure that next tornado is on the ground. So, John, I need your help. And there you go. So yeah, John and I, John and I made amends. John owns a liquor store on the side, and so I went there and bought some bought some product from him. And I I really wish I could have brought John with me to be a part of this. He's such a spectacular human being. Um, but you know, his place at the TV station right now is is where he's supposed to be, uh, as is Chelsea. Um I miss my team over there, but I've got a great team now.
SPEAKER_08Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and and and we we look forward to we will look forward to working with you in the future.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Look forward to look forward to working with you. If you ever need anything, just let me know.
SPEAKER_04All right, thank you. You have been listening to between the headlines. Our special guest this morning has been Matt Lobhan, who is the official weather provider and Emmy Award-winning meteorologist for the commercial dispatch. Thank you, sir. It really is. So, Zach, what are some things I need to know?
Sponsor Break And Weather Segment Setup
SPEAKER_08Three things to know this week. Number one, the March of the Mayor's food drive is underway through February 27th. Columbus joins communities all over the region collecting food items that will be distributed to food pantries. This year, Columbus is collecting canned soup, which can be dropped off at City Hall, the Municipal Complex, or Fire Station 1. Number two, Golden Triangle Theater will present, and this is a long name. The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery. I think I got that right. That's going to be Friday through Sunday at MUW's Cromwell Theater. Tickets are available at www.goldentriangletheater.com. Number three, the Real Love for Max Fundraiser will be 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday at Zachary's Restaurant on Fifth Street North. The Fish Fry and Raffle will support the uh recovery of Max Osborne. He was a victim of a very violent attack December 27th at the Waverley Dock. Fish plates and raffle tickets are$20 each.
SPEAKER_04Good things happening in Columbus and in the Golden Triangle set up by good-hearted people. Also, thanks for listening to us today. Find one friend of yours that needs to know what's happening here locally so they can listen in and continue to make things better around here. Reach out to us, be a part of the conversation tips at cdispatch.com. Keeping it real here in Catfish Alley Studio in historic downtown Columbus. Y'all stay friendly out there. I'm just a simple old country boy, but um I think that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00I've stepped out and I've said what I had to say.
Meteorologist Matt Loxham: Partnership Intro
SPEAKER_04You've been listening to Between the Headlines with Zach and David. That's what old people do.
SPEAKER_07That is.
