It’s been a really weird week in Mount Vernon.
Started with warning of tornadoes Monday afternoon, part of clashing temperature fronts that generated the storm that swept through the area. Strong rain, spots of hail and eerie sounding thunder were all witnessed. In January, a month not known for tornadic activity.
Tuesday brought an unplanned power outage for customers in Mount Vernon and Lisbon. Alliant Energy has said the outage was caused by equipment failure that tripped a nearby circuit breaker. More than 1,200 customers were without power.
A similar outage happened Friday morning, but impacted far fewer customers, and was restored in less than half an hour.
Wednesday brought slushy rain and snow to the area, impacting schools on Thursday morning with two hour delays, and made the trek to Mount Vernon city hall Wednesday evening a little more treacherous.
And for the newspaper offices, we’ve been dealing with computer problems at all our locations. That’s required long hours of the IT personnel for our company, as well as staff locally and throughout our chain adapting, pivoting and juggling this headache on top of the demands of putting out newspapers.
You really don’t realize how easy journalism is with certain resources until those are harder for you to use.
I preface this to say that there may be more small errors and items in this paper than usual because of that latter circumstance.
You can also always tell the weeks where speech competitions get underway in Iowa, though.
Weather woes and other hairy predicaments are far more prevalent those weeks.
Sunny Side: Weird weather, other items make journalism challenging, fun
January 26, 2023
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.