Storm leaves million without electricity

• By JARED JANES
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 1, 2008 - UPDATED: 10:37 p.m.

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Utility workers spent Monday’s remaining daylight hours  scouting downed transmission lines and substations that left almost a million Louisiana residents without power after Hurricane Gustav lashed the Gulf Coast.

Thousands of workers will begin this morning the task of repairing a heavily damaged power grid, strategically restoring power to important facilities like hospitals and plants before targeting larger and then smaller residential outages, Entergy spokesman Jeff Holeman said.

He declined to set a timetable on how long it will take Entergy to restore power to its customers, with some 737,661 customers without power across south Louisiana at 7 p.m. Monday.

“We don’t know until we see what we’re up against,” Holeman said. “There’s a lot of damage.”

More than 110 transmission lines — the high-voltage lines that feed the low-voltage power lines that supply homes and businesses — and 35 substations were down Monday afternoon, Holeman said. After Gustav’s winds died down, workers spent the rest of Monday trying to determine how to quickly put those lines and substations back in service.

In the Baton Rouge area, 225,608 Entergy customers were without power, Holeman said. The total outage of the company’s 1.2 million Louisiana customers is the third-largest in company history behind Hurricane Katrina’s 1.1 million outages and Hurricane Rita’s 800,000 outages.

The storm also forced Entergy to operate two of its Louisiana nuclear power plants — Waterford 3 and River Bend Station — below peak capacity, Holeman said.

Waterford 3 in St. Charles Parish was shut down Sunday night because of the expected high winds, and River Bend in West Feliciana Parish was powered down to 75 percent Monday because of decreased demand due to the outages.

Entergy wasn’t the only utility battered by the storm.

More than 99 percent of DEMCO customers in Livingston, East Baton Rouge, Ascension, West Feliciana, East Feliciana, St. Helena and Tangipahoa parishes were without power, the utility reported on its Web site. A total of 94,129 of its 95,018 members did not have power.

Cleco Corp., which has 273,000 customers in the state, said 140,000 were without power and those outages were spreading.

Holeman said utility companies started preparing for expected outages by lining up workers, setting up staging points and ordering supplies when Hurricane Gustav was in the Gulf of Mexico.

Entergy will deploy more than 9,000 utility workers, some on loan from other utilities from other states as part of mutual aid agreements, beginning today to heavily damaged areas, Holeman said.