Power milestone forecast

• By MARK BALLARD AND SARAH CHACKO
• Advocate staff writers
• Published: Sep 7, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Power is expected to return to about half of the Baton Rouge area by the end of the day today, said officials with the two utility companies that provide electricity in East Baton Rouge Parish.

“We feel like we’re ahead of the schedule,” said Dennis Dawsey, Entergy’s vice president of distribution operations for Louisiana. Entergy Gulf States LLP has 161,832 customers in East Baton Rouge Parish, of whom 100,917 were in the dark Saturday.

“We expect to be at 50 percent of the customers restored in the Baton Rouge area by end of the day,” Dawsey said. In the five days since Hurricane Gustav’s landfall, Entergy has restored 563,327 of the nearly 900,000 customers whose power went off Monday.

Similarly, Jeff Kilpatrick, general manager and chief executive of DEMCO, said Saturday that his crews already have succeeded in turning on the lights for about half of the company’s 30,926 customers in Baton Rouge, with about 15,700 customers left to restore.

“It’s going good. We’re waiting for Entergy to light up some of our distribution points,” Kilpatrick said. Entergy moves the power DEMCO buys into the company’s distribution system. Once those stations are operational, Kilpatrick said DEMCO could restore power to another 10,000 customers.

“We’re bringing in a big group from Mississippi to work in Baton Rouge,” Dawsey said. That means 3,000 workers in Baton Rouge raising lines, installing transformers and repairing substations, he said.

Dawsey said the neighborhoods Entergy’s crews are scheduled to work today include: Goodwood, Hickory Ridge, Park Oaks,
Westminster, the Garden District, Villa del Rey, Brownfield, Country Manor, Zachary, Baker, Nicholson Drive extended to the parish line, Livonia, Maringouin, Grosse Tete, Gonzales and between Airline Highway and the Amite River.

“There will be a big effort starting in that Sherwood Forest and Broadmoor area on Sunday,” Dawsey said. Those neighborhoods had more large and heavy trees downed than anywhere else in the city, he said.

North of the city, in St. Francisville, Jackson and Clinton, trees fell on wires and damaged conductors, he said. The hilly terrain there has made repairs to the transmission system difficult, he said.

On Saturday, Entergy crews were able to repower several substations, including ones that distribute electricity for neighborhoods along College Drive north of Interstate 10 to Jefferson Highway and others that service Jefferson Terrace, Dawsey said.

Once the substations are energized, crews move into the neighborhoods to work on the lines and transformers that feed electricity to individual houses, he said.

Often, in a neighborhood some houses have their power restored while others remain dark.

Dawsey said that such patchwork is inevitable as the linemen first attempt to energize the larger lines that transmit electricity and to which most houses are connected. Some smaller distribution lines, to which only a handful of houses are connected, also tap into the larger feeder lines. Homes on the smaller “taps” have to wait for attention until after those connected to the larger lines are up and running properly, he said.