Intro About 24 hours ago, around 6500 people in Gentilly. The fairgrounds and Treme saw the lights go out. Then overnight, more than 7000 people uptown were in the dark says a piece of equipment called the Lightning Arrester. It failed. Lily Cummings explains what it is and what's being done to really prevent this from happening again. The outage Last call came early Tuesday night at the Seahorse saloon. The power went out. We had to close early around 930. The bar and the surrounding fairgrounds, Gentilly and Treme neighborhoods were in the dark. Bartender Hans Leonard says it's salt in the wound to an already slow season. She had her shift cut short and the business as well that outage was restored. But hours later of uptown were pitch black. Power was restored there just before six am Wednesday. On Wednesday afternoon, energy New Orleans officials addressed the cause of the outages, aging equipment. And last week, we had a huge thunderstorm come through road through our system. So they took a lot of hits to the lightning arrest these arrests not only protect against lightning, but they protect against surges. So the whole of these systems are to ensure that we have shorter duration outages, as well as less catastrophic, less costly outages, lightning arrest like this one activate during a surge or lightning and we may never notice, but over time they wear down. This time says they failed. We have seen a 130% increase in lightning strikes just this year affecting that. Infrastructure says that there are 30,000 of these arrests across Orleans Parish. They've identified that 138 need to be replaced and they've replaced 24. So far the replacement are these more modern weather resilient arrest is $1000 and the New Orleans City Council have gone back and forth over who should pay to upgrade the utility's 70 year old infrastructure. To me, the most important thing is this is what we are doing to prevent it from happening again. It's clear that New Orleanians are ready for change of a pain. Lily Cummings Wwl Louisiana Outro says the arrests are inspected monthly and they have a running list of which of them need to be replaced. Ee says arrests that impact the Superdome and key areas for the Super Bowl have already been replaced.