Entergy: It could take weeks to restore power in SW Louisiana

As Hurricane Laura makes her way north, she leaves behind tens-of-thousands of Entergy customers with no power.

“In southwest Louisiana, this morning we had approximately 74,000 customer outages, with the majority of those centered around the Calcasieu parish area,” Entergy spokesperson David Freese told WWL First News.

According to Entergy’s outage map, 174,567 homes and businesses are without power as of Thursday morning. Freese says that is because of scattered outages across the state due to Laura’s outer high winds.

“There are some scattered outages in different parts of the state, because you got to remember, while this storm was predicted to be the size of Rita it is still pretty expansive in size so many of those could be due to high winds.

“We will have a better idea of what the restoration time will be once we can deploy our scouts and drone pilots to those hard hit areas,” Freese said. “And those damage assessments will start coming in the coming days and that will give us an idea of what materials and resources we need to deploy in those areas. Also it will give us a better idea of how long it will take for us to restore power.”

Freese says customers need to be patient as it could be days before power is fully restored to the hardest hit parishes.

“We did warn customers that this restoration could take weeks and with this Cat 4 that is certainly possible,” said Freese.

SOURCE: https://www.w24news.com