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Entergy held a press conference Saturday morning as hundreds of thousands of residents across southeast Louisiana are still without lights in Hurricane Ida’s aftermath. Earlier this week, the energy company — which serves over 40,000 customers in Lafourche and 27,000 in Terrebonne — gave the two Bayou Region parishes an estimated by Sept. 29 date for restoration, with power coming online in some areas before then.
On Saturday, Entergy officials said they will shift resources toward the Terrebonne-Lafourche area as power is restored in other regions to help speed up the process. “Absolutely,” said John Hawkins, Vice President for Distribution Operations.“We’re continuing to adjust our plan, and as we advance restoration in specific areas, we will continue to adjust and move resources…We call that cascading, and we begin to cascade to other regions. In advance of that, we start staging material. We start having vegetation resources move in that direction…So once resources do arrive, they can just start setting poles, stringing wire and getting customers restored as soon as possible.”
Phillip May, Entergy Louisiana President and CEO, added that there are hundreds of line workers and vegetation workers in the region. “They are working to do the restoration work as we speak — 16 hour days. And in parts of that area, we are still waiting on repairs to the transmission system in order to be able to energize those lines that have been repaired. So, we just encourage our customers to continue to be patient, noting that as we begin to get power in those areas, those dates are outside dates for 90% of the customers to have their power restored,” he said.
“But you will begin to see the critical customers get their power back on: hospitals and emergency operation centers, fire stations, police stations,” May continued. “We’ll also be trying to work to light those commercial corridors to get grocery stores, big box stores, gas stations, back online so that they can support those communities.”
The destruction Ida caused in the Bayou Region set its restoration timeline weeks behind other southeast Louisiana parishes, not lack of resources in the area, Entergy officials said. “It’s the damage,” Hawkins said. “In Terrebonne alone, we have over 3,000 poles that have been damaged, significant damage down there. So that will require a lot of work…We have crews down there paving the way because one thing we want to do is try to get some of those major thoroughfares, some of your critical customers — we want to bring some hope to the area. And then, we’ll continue to cascade. But there is significant work down there, which is driving that date that you see. But one thing you should know is that we will continue to adjust our plans to try to bring in any of those dates.”
May said Ida damaged or destroyed 22,404 utility poles, pulled down 25,977 spans of wire and forced 5,216 transformers to fail, and that’s with 97% of the company’s total assessment complete. The number of poles damaged or destroyed during Ida is more than hurricanes Katrina, Zeta and Delta combined, May said. “This storm is clearly one of the most devastating things we’ve ever seen in southeast Louisiana. No storm has even come close to this in terms of the devastation it’s placed on our system.”
So far, Entergy has restored power to 282,000 of the 902,000 customers who lost their power during the storm.
Entergy advises residents to sign up for the company’s text alerts to find out if their power has been restored while they are away. CLICK HERE to learn more.
