Quitman County SNAP households can request storm food replacement benefits

Winter Storm Fern left some Quitman County families staring at empty refrigerators and thawed freezers, and Mississippi officials opened a way for current SNAP households to recover part of that loss.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services said current SNAP clients who lost food because of a power outage lasting more than four hours could request replacement benefits. The aid was capped at the amount of the food loss and could not exceed the household’s normal monthly SNAP allotment, making it a partial reset for groceries that had already been paid for with tight household budgets.

Quitman County was included among the 28 additional counties that had until Feb. 23, 2026, to request replacement benefits. In the 15 hardest-hit counties, the Food and Nutrition Service approved mass replacement benefits automatically, so eligible households there did not need to submit the MDHS-EA-508 form to receive help. For Quitman County residents, the request still depended on filing the household statement of loss.

MDHS said the statement of food loss could be submitted online, in person, by mail, by email or by fax to the county office. The agency’s SNAP guidance says a household disaster can include an extended power outage caused by a storm, which is the exact kind of loss many rural families faced when the lights went out and food safety disappeared with the power.

For Quitman County households, the stakes were especially sharp. The county had 6,176 residents in the 2020 Census and an estimated 5,364 on July 1, 2025, with Census QuickFacts showing the county was 73.1% Black. USDA’s Economic Research Service says rural low-access tracts are measured using a 10-mile threshold to the nearest supermarket, a standard that underscores how hard it can be to replace spoiled food quickly in a county where every grocery run can take planning.

Marks also has lived through that scarcity. Local reporting has shown that a full-service grocery store reopening there restored access after years without a supermarket, cutting trips that once took roughly 30 to 90 minutes round trip. That made the storm’s food losses more than an inconvenience. For many households, a ruined freezer meant losing meat, milk and other staples that were not easy to replace before the next benefit cycle.

Residents who needed help could contact the MDHS county office at 1054 Martin Luther King Dr. in Marks, or call 662-326-8021. In a county where grocery access has long been fragile, the replacement-benefit program gave SNAP households a short-term backstop after Winter Storm Fern turned stored food into a loss they could not afford to absorb.