Port Fourchon withstands Isaac’s punch, despite La. 1 damage
September 5, 2012Curfew, thefts land several in hot water
September 5, 2012
Hurricane Isaac spared the Tri-parish area major damage and flooding, but its relentless winds ran roughshod on electricity grids, blacking out tens of thousands of residents, abating communication, eliminating refrigeration and allowing south Louisiana mugginess to encroach indoors.
More than 34,500 Lafourche dwellings and about 24,000 in Terrebonne – nearly 59,000 customers in total – saw power outages on Thursday after the storm slowly maneuvered through the region. Throughout Louisiana, the outage totals crested at more than 900,000 without power that day, according to the state’s Public Service Commission.
Restoring power is a timely process, and the inconveniences for some lingered far longer than others. Each power provider has its own policy regarding field work during storms, but all faced similar inconveniences of their own as they had to re-set power poles, pull some from marshland and weather calls from residents powerless in more ways than one.
“It’s really hard to say how long it could possibly take (to restore all outages) because every storm is different,” said Susan Broussard, spokesperson for Cleco. The Pineville-based utility company services 20,000 customers in St. Mary Parish.
Hurricane Isaac’s center lumbered through Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes at a clip between 6 and 8 miles per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. Tropical storm- and hurricane-force winds blistered the parishes, and rainfall exceeded 10 inches in some areas. Lafourche Parish experienced the storm for a longer duration, almost relentlessly from Tuesday evening until Thursday.
Three-quarters (31,500) of Entergy’s customer base in Lafourche Parish was without power on Wednesday. In Terrebonne, where the storm wasn’t quite as unrelenting, 67 percent (17,500) of Entergy’s customers were blacked out.
A combined 9,200 SLECA customers in both parishes were also without power the day the storm let up. Of SLECA’s 20,860 customers in a five-parish area, 17,324 are domiciled in Lafourche and Terrebonne. At the peak, SLECA reported 12,000 outages, or 57 percent of its service.
SLECA crews, which included 163 linemen prepared to work 16-hour days, do not venture into winds exceeding 45 mph, general manager Joe Ticheli said. They did begin assessing damages as the eye idled through Terrebonne and Lafourche, he said.
Ticheli said that although SLECA sustained 100 percent outages during Hurricane Gustav, recovering from Isaac has been at times more difficult due to the lack of evacuees adding to traffic totals. “We had free reign of the parish,” he said.
Crews also encounter inconveniences when power poles are knocked into marshland. This requires the company to mobilize special equipment, such as all-terrain vehicles to assess and repair damages, Ticheli said.
Entergy Louisiana is the state’s largest, and therefore most visible, provider. The company was maligned last week, most notably by Jefferson Parish President John Young, who had more than 90,000 constituents without power as late as Sunday.
Entergy maintains it is restoring power as quickly as it can. With approximately 400,000 company and contract workers addressing the issue 24 hours a day, the company hoped to have at least 90 percent of its local outages restored by today.
As of Monday at 1:30 p.m., Terrebonne had 944 power outages across Entergy and SLECA, and Lafourche had 2,690, according to the utilities’ numbers.
Melanie Kraemer, who lives between Chackbay and Kraemer, relies on Entergy power and was still in the dark late last week. She and her husband only run their generator at night to maximize its gas life to protect refrigerated and frozen food from spoiling and after-dark temperatures from rising.
Kraemer said cell phone service in the region is spotty, so she leaves her phone on an end table, from where it can typically receive and send text messages. Those are sometimes lost in the data-transfer highway though, so without power, communication is unsteady at best, she said.
“That’s the biggest thing: There is no communication in times of emergency,” Kraemer said.
In St. Mary Parish, nearly 5,000 of Cleco’s 20,000 customers were without service last Thursday. By Saturday, the number had dropped to 21, and all Cleco customers in the parish had their power back on Sunday.
Broussard said the utility company doesn’t have a policy in place to dictate when crews can operate during a storm, and that it is instead left up to managers’ discretion. Like all local providers, however, the company stays inside during inclement weather.
Like all utility companies in southeast Louisiana, Cleco deals with the bayou terrain in its restoration process. And like all utility companies everywhere, they have to balance their work while the customer base stews in south Louisiana-summer temperatures.
“Sometimes our customers are anxious and they may stop the crews and try to talk to the crews,” Broussard said. “That, while I think it’s very well intended, does tend to delay our progress to some extent.
“The other side of that is it also has the potential to put the customers in danger because those are work zones, hard-hat areas, and we want to make sure the customers stay safe.”
A power pole lies fallen in Golden Meadow – snapped by Hurricane Isaac’s winds. The storm left thousands of people without power in the Tri-parish area throughout the week.
