Entergy updates progress on power restoration in Northeast Louisiana

MONROE, La. (KNOE) - Entergy has made progress in its effort to restore power to Northeast Louisiana communities hit hard Hurricane Laura.

Ouachita Parish suffered the second largest number of outages in the state with approximately 60,000 customers losing power on Thursday. Nearly everyone in the parish lost power. As of 4:30 p.m. on Friday, about power has been restored to about 6,500 customers. That leaves roughly 53,000 to go.

There is a lot of work ahead for restoration crews. In places where it was safe to restore power, lights are already starting to come back on. Entergy says they are still assessing damage in the area, but they say four transmission structures -- like those huge power poles -- were damaged. They also had 574 broken poles, 1,108 spans of downed wire, and 910 broken crossarms. (A span is the length of line between two poles.)

The vast amount of damage means it could take days to assess and repair infrastructure in many cases. Tougher situations could take a week with the toughest taking even longer.

Entergy says their Louisiana restoration team includes nearly 13,400 people from 28 states and drones to more quickly assess the damage. Since assessment is still underway and will be for another day or more, Entergy hasn’t offered estimates to specific customers on when they might have power restored. However, the general approach Entergy takes is to repair damage serving large blocks of customers first then work their way down to neighborhood lines and then to individual lines. This allows Entergy to restore power to more people faster.

Meanwhile, work continues in Ouachita and surrounding parishes. Since Thursday, the number of outages in Morehouse Parish is down by about 1,000 and in Richland Parish, it’s down by about 1,800. Tensas dropped by about 500, down to 121. Other Northeast Louisiana parishes haven’t seen any significant change in their outage numbers.