Tennessee in the path for remnants of Hurricane Katrina
NASHVILLE — Tennessee was under a tropical storm warning from Hurricane Katrina, with winds of 40 mph and lots of rain forecast for Tuesday.
But Agriculture Commissioner Ken Givens saw a bright side to the storm, saying the rain may benefit the state’s crops because of a recent dry spell. He said the rain is particularly welcome in Haywood County, the state’s largest cotton producer.
“The timing is good,” Givens said. “Some of West Tennessee has been extremely dry. Two to three inches would be good.”
Remnants of Hurricane Katrina were expected to hit portions of southwest Tennessee first, dropping as much as 6 inches of rain in some places by Tuesday night.
Haywood County farmer Allen King said the area’s cotton, corn and wheat crops don’t need that much, but he said about 2 inches is fine because the county hasn’t had much rain since Hurricane Dennis early last month.
In the case of cotton, King said that getting the rain right now won’t hurt the crop because many of the bolls are still closed.
“Most of our cotton is green right now,” he said. “I don’t see there being any damage.”
However, Chism Craig, a cotton specialist at the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service office in Madison County, said he’s concerned about high winds that “could blow the cotton to the ground.”
“That will make it difficult to harvest,” said Craig, adding that harvesting usually begins around the end of September.
Heavy rain expected from Katrina across the Tennessee and Ohio river basins were expected to raise the Lower Mississippi River, where barge traffic has been threatened this year by unusually low water.
The Mississippi fell to a four-year low at Memphis on Aug. 17 due to a continuing drought through much of the river’s upper drainage region.
“With the amounts of rain they’re forecasting, there’s definitely going to be a rise, but how much is hard to say right now,” said David Berretta of the Corps of Engineers headquarters in Memphis. “What we’re looking at is the river getting back to more like normal conditions for this time of the year.”
Forecasters predicted Middle Tennessee would get the brunt of the storm. The entire area was under a flood warning through Tuesday evening, and officials prepared for widespread electrical outages due to high winds with gusts of up to 50 mph.
“We are preparing for the worst,” said Teresa Corlew, spokeswoman for the Nashville Electric Service. “This storm could cause major power outages across Middle Tennessee.”
She said people should make sure they have emergency items such as batteries and flashlights, portable radios, battery-powered clocks, nonperishable food, and plenty of bottled water.
Corlew also urged “people who depend on electricity for medical reasons to make arrangements in case their power goes out.”
The storm was expected to leave the state late Tuesday night but not before dropping up to 3 inches of rain on parts of East Tennessee. The Cumberland Plateau and southern portions of the region were under a flood watch through Tuesday night.
In Chattanooga, a group of tree-cutting crews from Clifton, N.J., arrived early Monday at a suburban motel after an overnight trip and awaited directions from utility companies about their ultimate destination, likely in Louisiana or Mississippi.
Joe Adamiak, a manager for the Dayton, Ohio-based company, said their crews routinely respond to damaging storms in the South.
Adamiak said he was attending his sons’ soccer games when he got the call notifying him about the assignment. He’s prepared for the “worst case scenario” of staying as long as a month.
And if there’s no electricity?
“We sleep in tents or sometimes we just sleep in trucks,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Bill Poovey in Chattanooga and Woody Baird in Memphis contributed to this story.