On a warm day last week, Rosa Meadors looked outside the window of her home on North Park Street in Seymour and thought it was time to get her yard ready for spring.

Flowers throughout her yard were popping up, and a few leaves remained from last fall.

Spring may have officially started Tuesday, but that didn’t stop winter weather from dumping more than a half-foot of snow in parts of Jackson County late Tuesday into Wednesday.

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“I think Mother Nature pulled an early April Fool’s on us,” Meadors said while standing in her snow-covered driveway. “Flowers I saw are now covered in snow.”

The storm caused problems for motorists throughout Jackson County, gave students a chance to take part in snow on spring break, and both Duke Energy and Jackson County REMC reported a low number of power outages.

The county park in Sparksville was temporarily closed as crews cleared a fallen tree.

The storm gave Jackson County its most significant snow totals this year, said Duane Davis, executive director of Jackson County Emergency Management/Homeland Security. He said he measured 6.5 inches of snow in Brownstown early Wednesday morning.

“Our highest total this year couldn’t have been more than a couple inches at the most,” he said.

“This is probably a head start on next year’s snowfall.”

The high snow totals were due to Jackson and surrounding counties being the epicenter of the storm.

“It appears we were in a group of counties that received some of the highest totals,” Davis said.

The totals did not come as a surprise, as the National Weather Service upgraded a winter weather advisory to a winter storm warning Tuesday afternoon.

“They pretty much hit this spot-on,” Davis said. “They updated the advisory to a warning, and we were in the bull’s-eye for 3 to 5 inches.”

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Carothers said the storm kept the department busy Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning.

He didn’t have an official count on the number of incidents the county responded to because so many incidents were happening simultaneously.

“We were dealing with anywhere between 15 and 20 incidents at once Tuesday night,” he said.

That forced day shift officers to stay after the shifts ended and night shift officers came in an hour early. Reserve officers also assisted, Carothers said.

“We had everyone jump in and help, so it was all hands on deck,” he said.

The most significant incident was when multiple semitrailers slid into a ditch on West U.S. 50 near the Rumpke landfill in Medora.

Carothers said the semitrailers were trying to get from Jackson County to Lawrence County. There were no injuries reported in the incident.

“They weren’t Rumpke trucks, but we had semis in the ditch crossways,” he said.

Meadors said the snowfall did not bother her, as she planned to take her mother to a doctor’s appointment Wednesday.

“The snow doesn’t stop us,” she said. “Just have to take extra time and be careful.”