Power returned to some parts of hurricane-battered New Orleans on Wednesday morning, but 1 million people still face weekslong outages as high temperatures threaten the region.
Entergy, the utility company providing electricity to much of the city, said its crews turned the power back on for an unspecified number of customers in eastern New Orleans through the New Orleans Power Station. But the full restoration of power to the region “will still take time,” the company added.
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Transmission lines from Slidell, which sits across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, are moving what little power is available into the city, City Council President Helena Morena said.
Thousands of workers continued to assess the extent of damage to electricity infrastructure Tuesday, days after Hurricane Ida smashed into the Gulf Coast on Sunday as a Category 4 storm, knocking out the company’s eight transmission lines with its 150 mph sustained winds.
The company held off on offering estimates of power restoration to specific neighborhoods in its Wednesday update and notified customers that damage assessments must be completed first. The destruction of its transmission lines, including the toppling of a 400-foot transmission tower on the bank of the Mississippi River, led Entergy to put initial estimates of power restoration at up to three weeks for those in the worst-hit areas.
“Because our transmission system spans land, water and marsh, in many cases special equipment will be used as we begin to inspect, repair and replace the steel, concrete and tensioned wires that are the foundation for our structures,” Entergy explained.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell stressed Tuesday that officials still have no timeline as to when power will be restored and said her administration’s “top priority” is to restore power to area hospitals, adding that city officials are working to ensure hospitals have enough fuel to power their generators in the interim.
High summer temperatures are compounding the risks to residents posed by the continued blackout. The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory for the New Orleans area for the second straight day, with heat index values forecast to reach 108 degrees Wednesday.
President Joe Biden, who approved a disaster declaration for Louisiana in Ida’s wake, spoke on Tuesday with several utility companies serving southeastern markets about the efforts to restore electricity.
The federal government is assisting in the restoration effort by sharing aerial and satellite images to expedite damage assessments and helping with debris removal, according to a press readout of the call.
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Utility executives also spoke of the need to enable the grid to endure intense storms through new infrastructure and added resiliency — things addressed in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as in Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation framework.
Updated numbers from the U.S. Department of Energy reveal some 1 million customer outages remain in Louisiana, with less than 30,000 remaining in Mississippi as of Wednesday morning.
