After days for thousands of customers without power and frigid temperatures Entergy Louisiana Spokesperson Brandon Scardigli said they hope to have power restored for Baton Rouge customers by the end of the day. As for customers in North Louisiana that received a bout of freezing rain last night…
“Our crews are going to have to get out. They’re going to have to go through their normal scouting process, and once they’re able to get on the roads and see the damage that we have, we’ll be able to have a restoration time for those customers,” said Scardigli.
Residents in Louisiana are seasoned to power outages due to hurricanes, but not lengthy outages when freezing temperatures are involved. Scardigli said restoration with an ice storm is much different because ice accumulation involves individual lines and poles that are pulled down by ice and trees.
“As far as restoration goes those are usually just a much slower process. It’s not like a hurricane or a tropical storm where we’re able to work on those substations and those bigger transmission lines and get a wide swatch of customers on at once,” said Scardigli.
Entergy, along with CLECO and SWEPCO, are asking customers to conserve power to avoid overloads, due to historic demand. Utility providers have also conducted rolling blackouts to reduce usage this week. As the frigid temperatures continue, Scardigli said more rolling blackouts are possible.
“While we don’t know for sure if or when it’s going to happen, as long as this cold spell does go on, we are asking our customer to conserve as much as possible to avoid those outages and to avoid any further outages down the line,”
As of noon Entergy Louisiana reported 60,307 customers without power CLECO says 29,962 are without power.
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