Tippah County starts Tuesday with the heat advisory finally set to expire, county supervisors meeting this morning in Ripley, more than a million dollars in new health care funding for the county, and a full slate of volleyball tonight from Blue Mountain to Falkner. Here’s what’s happening in Tippah County today, Sept. 15, 2026.
Heat Advisory Lifts Tonight
The stretch of dangerous heat that’s covered Tippah County since Monday morning is due to end this evening. The National Weather Service’s Memphis office has the advisory running through 7 p.m. today, with heat index values reaching as high as 109 degrees across North Mississippi, West Tennessee, East Arkansas and southeast Missouri. Alcorn News reports the same upper-level ridge that’s parked over the Lower Mississippi Valley all week is finally starting to loosen its grip, though above-average temperatures are expected to hang around the Mid-South into midweek even after the advisory drops.
Until 7 p.m., the same precautions still apply: push outdoor chores to early morning or after dark, drink water before you’re thirsty, and check on elderly neighbors or anyone without reliable air conditioning. It’s been a long two days of it — worth getting through the last few hours the smart way.
Board of Supervisors Meets This Morning
The Tippah County Board of Supervisors holds its regular meeting at 10 a.m. today on the second floor of the county building at 101 E. Spring St. in Ripley. The meeting is open to the public, so anyone with business before the board — or who just wants to see county government at work — can sit in.
Tippah County Hospital, Fast Pace Land $1.06 Million in State Health Grants
Tippah County is set to receive $1,067,900 through Gov. Tate Reeves’ Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program, part of three awards announced Monday aimed at modernizing local health care technology. Tippah County Hospital received two grants totaling $551,300 — $151,300 to replace aging hardware and strengthen cybersecurity, and $400,000 to implement a cloud-based system for the hospital’s financial, supply chain and administrative operations. Fast Pace Mississippi was separately awarded $516,600 for a new electronic health record system and related IT and cybersecurity upgrades.
The awards are part of a much larger rollout: 167 grants totaling just over $104 million were announced statewide Monday, drawn from Mississippi’s $205.9 million first-year budget for the five-year program. Reeves framed the funding as an effort to bring health care services closer to home for rural Mississippians rather than simply propping up existing facilities. Neighboring DeSoto County was awarded $842,710 in the same round, according to DeSoto County News, and Mississippi Today, republished on DeSoto County News, reports two more rounds of the program — covering workforce and psychiatric emergency services, then rural care gaps and EHR modernization — are expected in the next several months. Read the full breakdown of Tippah County’s award for more on how each grant will be spent.
Volleyball Fills Four Gyms Tonight
It’s another busy night of high school volleyball across Tippah County. The Pine Grove Panthers host Jumpertown at 6 p.m., and the Walnut Wildcats welcome New Site at home, also at 6. The Ripley Tigers host Alcorn Central at 6:30, and the Falkner Eagles take on Wheeler at 7. All four matches are on TippahSports.com’s schedule for today, with live-update links on MaxPreps for each one.
It follows a Monday night that saw Ripley senior Jenna-Lynne Massengill continue building on the best cross-country season of her career — a personal-best 21:48.67 at the Myrtle Invitational, an 11th-place finish among 153 runners at New Albany, and a sixth-place finish at the Tupelo Invitational over the weekend. Monday’s Tippah County sports roundup has the full rundown on volleyball results and what’s coming up this week, including Friday’s football matchups sending Ripley host to East Webster and Walnut on the road to Alcorn Central.
Bypass Work Continues North of Ripley
Construction keeps moving on the MS 15 realignment connecting Blue Mountain and Ripley, part of the larger Ripley Bypass project. A new 1.5-mile, two-lane section opened Sept. 8 with two new bridges tying into State Route 368 and County Road 700, as Tippah News reported last week. The full bypass — roughly 10 miles of new highway plus a connector to MS 2, with 11 bridges in all — is a $194 million MDOT project that broke ground in the summer of 2024 and remains on schedule for completion in 2028, according to Construction News. Drivers on Highway 15 north of town should expect construction traffic to continue for some time yet.
What’s Coming Up
Tippah County’s fall calendar is filling in fast, with Top Notch Pro Wrestling in Blue Mountain on Sept. 18, a community yard sale in Blue Mountain on Sept. 19, and a Ripley Fire Department barbecue fundraiser on Sept. 25. Monday’s roundup has the full list of dates, times and prices for everything on the books through October.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
