Mississippi Power plans to strengthen power delivery system

MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) -Mississippi Power is starting a pair of power pole upgrade projects in Gulfport as part of its storm hardening program.

This is to strengthen the power delivery system for customers in the company’s most storm-prone areas.

Their mission is to replace wooden transmission poles with steel ones, beginning in Gulfport and heading east toward Biloxi.

During these two projects, more than 250 power poles will be upgraded to make the equipment more resistant to storms.

“When you think about a major storm restoration effort, one of the most time-consuming tasks is replacing damaged or broken wooden poles, so with more robust structures like the ones we are going to be installing, we expect a far less outage time that our customers are going to face, for example, last summer in moss point we had tornadoes that had rolled through we ended up having to replace about 75 broken wooden poles, that took a lot of time if we’d had more robust poles in place we wouldn’t have anticipated in seeing a fraction of that kind of damage,” says Mark Loughman, Coast Division Manager.

The projects are expected to be completed by the end of 2024, as similar system upgrades will be performed in and around Meridian in the future.

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