Entergy Update: Power Outages after Hurricane Francine

Someone who um has gotten uh more information on energy. Energy held a conference call a little while ago. Our Rachel Hanley joins us now and Rachel uh you had told us as far as energy was concerned in looking at what the culprit was as a result. Like what caused the widespread outages. You say that they were saying that it's not an infrastructural problem. Mainly it's a matter of down trees and whatnot. That's to blame. What they had said specifically was that transmission was not the main driver of the majority of these outages. It was vegetation and that they had expected it to be vegetation, especially because of the drought that we've been having recently. They did say that we're going to get more updates over the next few days. This was a pretty quick uh phone call with energy officials. So we're really hoping to get more clarification on exactly what they mean by that over the next few days because we do have questions about infrastructure and how that might have contributed to it and every area is so different that I'm sure parish by parish, we're gonna end up getting so much more information, but I, I did wanna recap um what we heard on that call because we've been getting so many questions from all of you uh all morning about power restoration. We know it's probably top of mind for almost everybody. Um, as we said, vegetation, major concern uh for them both. They, they were saying in terms of a cause of the outages and also trying to get to these areas, they have to fix uh power lines. So we have seen pictures all morning of trees down as you said, branches, everything. So vegetation, that was their main uh that was their main point was the vegetation is there uh uh kind of at the forefront of this effort right now. Um trying to work around that. They also said, uh as you had said, bree that they will be prioritizing uh infrastructure like hospitals, pumping stations. And they also mentioned that they try to fix areas that are going to uh put the lights back on for as many people as possible. So as I said before, that's something to keep in mind if you live in a really rural area where maybe not that many people are on your same electrical grid because it could mean that your power will be turned on uh more slowly than somebody on say a busy city block or something. Um But they did say that that critical infrastructure, those hospitals pumping stations, those will be first before anything. Um one other important update we got today was that restoration has started in New Orleans. They said it's moved from the phase of just staging things to actually going out and starting to do some fixes in New Orleans. So that was definitely uh good news that was from Energy New Orleans, which again is a separate uh body from Energy Louisiana. Um Y'all did talk about and Terrebonne parishes and these are definitely definitely the areas that we are paying the most attention to in terms of power outages and the ones that we've gotten the most viewer questions about in terms of power outages. As y'all said, 30 more than 35,000 still out in Lafoe Parish and more than 25,000 out in Terrebonne Parish and Entergy did say that that was because they had the highest winds of any area. And they also mentioned uh the Jefferson Parish um also had a lot of outages because of that, especially the coastal areas of Jefferson Parish. Um We did ask about specific restoration timelines for Terrebonne and Larouche parishes again because those are the areas that we really are most concerned about at this point. And they said it was day one just too early to really give any kind of specific timeline for those. But they did give us kind of a kind of a broad sketch of what we could expect uh in terms of this restoration timeline for these really hard hit parishes. So this is the information that they were able to give in general. When we have a category one, category two storm, we guide that it could be up to. And I want to stress this is up to. That doesn't mean when customers will begin to be restored one week and it can be longer seven plus days. For a category two storm, we are have a large contingent of workers focused on an area. We'll be putting up additional resources so we can stage those folks directly in that bayou region. We knew that was gonna be a challenge with the path of the storm. We also knew vegetation was going to be a significant challenge. Those all came to pass and so we are prepared to deal with that. We are not able to say how quickly we can get power back on for loop Foo and Carone some of the hardest hit areas. But we intend to do our assessment as quickly as possible and be able to provide that information to our customers as quickly as possible. We do not anticipate this being an I A situation where extended for a long period of time and a couple of other points that they had made on that phone call uh were safety concerns. Um The biggest ones being, if you see any kind of electrical equipment, electrical equipment out or any down power lines, uh you're being asked to call 1 800 energy to report those because they can be really dangerous. They also mentioned generators, of course, as people's power is out, they are starting to run those uh to keep their air conditioning on and power life saving medical equipment, that kind of thing. We repeat it all the time. You have to make sure that those are not in your house and far enough away where there's no risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. Um because that can be fatal and you can't even detect it. Uh Something they also mentioned, which I thought was interesting because we don't hear this in the context of power outages very often was scams. They said that in the aftermath of a storm like this, a lot of people will try and take advantage of how desperate people are to get their power back on and try to uh tell them if you just pay me some cash right now, I can get your power back on. That's not real. That is a scam. If anybody tries to uh do that, they also want you to report that at 1 800 energy and they want to remind people that they energy will never ask for money in exchange for them repairing weather related damage. So that's how you can tell if uh something is a scam or not. So, all good updates um on day one of the power restoration, but they did say that they were going to be providing more over the next few days because this is something we'll be watching very, very closely. Rachel. We do thank you for that breakdown. There is a lot of people do want to know what is going on as far as restoration is concerned.