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.

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.”