Louisiana
Power restorations nearly complete in Louisiana after Hurricane Francine, Entergy says
Nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses that suffered power outages due to Hurricane Francine had their lights turned back on as of Monday, though there were still a few pockets of outages in the hardest hit coastal areas.
About 2,700 customers of Entergy, which as Louisiana’s largest utility accounted for about three out of four of the nearly 400,000 outages caused by the storm, were still without power early Monday. The utility said that most would have power returned by the end of the day.
Other utilities that had tens of thousands of outages were almost entirely restored. Cleco Power, which has customers both on the northshore and in coastal parishes, had just 44 still without power on Monday, compared to about 37,000 on Wednesday evening. Two cooperatives, Dixie Electric and Washington St. Tammany Electric, which together had 10,000 customers offline, had restored all but a couple hundred by Monday.
The return of power in just a few days was a relief to residents scarred by the weeklong outages brought by Hurricane Ida, a strong Category Four hurricane that knocked down major transmission lines and crippled Entergy’s grid.
A crisscross of leaning utility poles near Cocodrie, Louisiana in Terrebonne Parish the morning after Hurricane Francine crossed into Louisiana on Thursday, September 12, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
On Monday, New Orleans City Council members, who regulate Entergy within the city, praised Entergy for restoring power in relatively short order, though they also questioned why a storm whose winds had been reduced to tropical storm status by the time it reached New Orleans caused 60,000 outages.
Francine made landfall Wednesday near Morgan City in St. Mary Parish as a Category 2 hurricane before zagging northeast and then north through the heavily populated parts of Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes. By Friday, Entergy had reconnected about half of its customers who lost power and then made steady progress over the weekend.
The company said it deployed about 8,000 assessment and repair staff, including contractors, to respond to extensive damage. Its scouts had identified nearly 815 utility poles, over 190 transformers, approximately 1,300 spans of distribution wire and more than 650 crossarms that were damaged.
“We appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding as we worked tirelessly to restore power,” said Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May in a news release.
Terrebonne Parish was still the most affected area on Monday, with large sections of Houma and neighborhoods in nearby towns like Bourg and Bayou Blue among the last to get their power restored.
Terrebonne Parish President Jason Bergeron said that about 50 residents were still sheltering in the Houma Municipal Auditorium on Verret Street, awaiting power or because their homes were too damaged to return to. He said power in all but the most remote areas should be back online by the end of the day on Monday.
“I cannot give enough credit to the linemen who’ve been pushing hard and to the lawmen who’ve been helping to move them around to where they needed to go,” Bergeron said.
The parish, which has about 41,000 households, had about 1,700 outages early on Monday.
Random outages
As the repairs wrapped up, Entergy’s online outage map, which uses red and green lines to show which areas are powered and which are not, demonstrated the sometimes haphazard and difficult nature of far-flung repairs.
For instance, in the village of Cocodrie, which reaches nearly into the the Gulf of Mexico at Bay Cocodrie and East Bayou, the lights were on for the residents of Redfish Street, while those to the west just across Highway 57 were still waiting.
Entergy described how crews used a small fleet of air boats and marsh buggies to reach the most remote areas.
“In some cases, muddy terrain in tight spaces require lineworkers wearing special boots to climb utility poles without the assistance of machinery at all,” Entergy officials said. “Crews use safety ropes to secure climbers who perform repairs up to 35 feet in the air.”
Other persistent pockets of small outages were located near the airport in Kenner, on the West Bank, in parts of Baton Rouge and in Tangipahoa Parish. Entergy said those repairs also were expected to be wrapped up by the end of the day on Monday.
Those scattered ares of a few dozen here and there were mostly “sporadic, brief outages to make repairs…now that we’re going back and cleaning everything up,” said Brandon Scardigli, spokesperson for Entergy Louisiana. “We do anticipate they will all be back on by this evening.”
DESTIN, Fla. — A North Carolina man allegedly headed to do a mass shooting at a large Louisiana festival was arrested in Okaloosa County Wednesday evening.
Federal authorities contacted the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office in regards to the man. The department was told the man would be in the area.
The man’s name has not been shared by authorities.
Deputies found the man at a Destin Hotel. They took him into custody as a “fugitive from justice.”
The man will be extradited to Louisiana to face state charges, deputies say.
Louisiana
Mom whose 3 children were killed in Louisiana mass shooting still has bullet lodged in face — and sometimes thinks kids are alive
The mother of three of the eight children massacred by deranged Army veteran dad Shamar Elkins in Louisiana still has a bullet lodged in her head and is struggling with her memory — sometimes believing her kids are still alive, according to a relative.
Christina Snow, the girlfriend of 31-year-old Shamar Elkins, was shot in the face early Sunday when the former National Guardsman went on a shooting rampage at two nearby homes in Shreveport.
Three of Snow’s children she shared with Elkins — Braylon Snow, 5, Khedarrion Snow, 6, and Sariahh Snow, 11 — were killed in their home.
Elkins fired a bullet through Snow’s nose which is lodged in her head, and doctors aren’t ready to risk surgery, according to her cousin Jamarckus Snow.
The mom is now dealing with heartbreaking memory loss about the fate of her kids.
“One day, she’ll remember they’re dead. I heard yesterday she woke up and was like, ‘I got to get my kids ready for school.’ She’ll lose memory of what happened,” he told NBC News.
“One day, she’ll know, and the next day, she’s thinking her kids is still there.”
Follow the latest updates on the Louisiana father who killed 8 children in Shreveport shooting:
Elkins fatally shot his seven children — the three he shared with Snow and his four daughters with his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh: Jayla Elkins, 3, Shayla Elkins, 5, Kayla Pugh, 6, and Layla Pugh, 7.
He also killed Mar’Kaydon Pugh, 10, the son of his wife’s sister, who was staying at their house.
The vet turned his gun on Pugh and Snow, too, severely wounding both women, who are still in the hospital.
Elkins shot himself in the driveway of his former military mentor as law enforcement closed in.
The motive for the shooting remains unclear, but Elkins was suffering from mental health issues and was scheduled to appear in court on Monday after Pugh asked him for a divorce.
Louisiana
Federal appeals court upholds Texas’ Ten Commandments law. What does it mean for Louisiana?
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a Texas law requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, just weeks after the same court allowed a similar Louisiana law to take effect.
A majority of judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ law, which is nearly identical to Louisiana’s, is constitutional and does not violate students’ religious freedom. In February, the court lifted an injunction on Louisiana’s law, which cleared schools to put up the posters, but the judges said it was too early to rule on that law’s constitutionality.
Tuesday’s ruling could bode well for Louisiana’s law if it eventually returns to the 5th Circuit, considered the country’s most conservative federal court of appeals.
In their majority opinion, the judges rejected the argument that posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms would pressure students to honor the biblical mandates or adopt particular beliefs.
“To plaintiffs, merely exposing children to religious language is enough to make the displays engines of coercive indoctrination. We disagree,” the majority wrote about the Texas law, known as S.B. 10. A minority of the court’s active judges dissented.
Even though Tuesday’s ruling only addressed the Texas case, defenders of Louisiana’s legislation celebrated it as a victory. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the 5th Circuit’s argument in upholding Texas’ law was identical to the one Louisiana made in defense of its law.
“Our law clearly was always constitutional,” she posted on X, “and I am grateful that the Fifth Circuit has now definitively agreed with us.”
Louisiana’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed the law in 2024, which requires all public K-12 schools and colleges to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. A group of parents quickly challenged the law in court, and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that stopped the state from enforcing the law.
In February, the 5th Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, saying it had been premature to block the law before it took effect. The judges said they could not rule on the law’s constitutionality before seeing how it played out in schools.
But in the case of Texas’ law, which that state’s Republican-led Legislature passed in 2025, the court did rule on the merits.
Rejecting arguments made by attorneys for the Texas families who challenged the law, the 5th Circuit majority said that requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments does not amount to the government endorsing a particular religion, which the U.S. Constitution forbids. The law also does not impose religious beliefs on students, the judges wrote.
“As noted, S.B. 10 authorizes no religious instruction and gives teachers no license to contradict children’s religious beliefs (or their parents’),” the majority opinion says. “No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin.”
The Texas families were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serving as pro bono counsel. The same groups, including Louisiana’s ACLU chapter, represented the Louisiana families.
In a statement Tuesday, the organizations said they are “extremely disappointed” by the 5th Circuit’s ruling, adding that they expect to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction,” the groups said. “This decision tramples those rights.”
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