Beauregard Electric Co-op tells its customers to be prepared to be without power for at least the next four weeks. Co-op spokesperson Danielle Tilley says they’ve brought in 500-600 additional storm restoration workers to cut trees, reset poles and make repairs to more than 5,700 miles of line.
“Some of the guys on the ground are saying this is worse than Hurricane Rita and in some situations, they are saying it is double what Hurricane Rita was. We have approximately 43,000 meters and at this moment right now, none of those meters are running,” said Tilley.
Tilley says substations and transmission lines will be repaired first and then service lines, but substations will not be able to receive power until its larger transmission lines are functioning again.
“We know how that situation is, we went through Rita, so we wanted to be able to give people at least a good estimate on what they should be prepared for. We think that four weeks is a good estimate as of now,” said Tilley.
Tilley says with the level of damage received from the storm, some customers may be out of power even longer than four weeks.
“We just really won’t know until we get to that four-week mark, then we will kind of be able to reaccess things, and there are folks who might be out longer than that, but we think that four weeks is a good starting point to tell people what to prepare for,” said Tilley.
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