Entergy Louisiana announces 90% of its customers have had their power restored post-Hurricane Ida. John Hawkins, the utility’s Vice President of Distribution Operations, sums up the situation this way.
“Restoring power to just over 800,000 people in just over two weeks is unprecedented,” said Hawkins.
Entergy says they continue to work to restore power to the 72,000 customers who are still without electricity as of Wednesday morning. About 45% of the customers in St. John, St. Charles, Lafourche, and Terrebonne Parishes remain in the dark.
Hawkins praised the thousands of linemen and other utility workers for the speed of repairing Entergy’s electrical system and notes how Entergy keeps learning from previous storms how to effect repairs faster when the next storm hits.
“Understanding that each event is unique we take those lessons learned immediately after an event and we apply it and try to close the gaps before the next event,” said Hawkins.
He says Entergy has been able to make significant progress in the heavily impacted river parishes, Bayou Region and the I-55 corridor.
“I will tell you that 80-percent of the damaged poles that were identified were down in those southern bayou regions so it’s a tremendous amount of work there,” said Hawkins.
In all, he says Ida damaged more than 30,000 poles, 36,000 spans of wire and about 6,000 transformers.
Comments