Entergy: It will take three more days to get power to Bayou Gauche Island

Entergy officials report that after 11 days around 86 homes in St. Charles Parish are still without power due to Hurricane Isaac.

 Doug Rhodes, Entergy customer service manager, said most of the outages were on Bayou Gauche Island.  

“We have about 40 more poles down out that way that are down in the water,” Rhodes said. “We are very rarely on zero and the number bounces around from zero and if a feeder goes out it will immediately be 1,500 customers.”

 

Such an occurrence happened earlier today when a feeder line went out in Norco causing 1,500 customers to temporarily lose power.

 

“It had to do with a tree that was in the right-of-way and it feeds into Norco across the Spillway and is part of that Norco substation. It’s a debris issue,” Rhodes said. “It was out for about 15 minutes and we put it back in.”

 

Rhodes expects within three days all customers in the parish will have their power restored. However, with thunderstorms coming in tomorrow he said workers are not leaving the parish until they are sure the power supply is secured.  

 

“You’ve got a lot of weak points that are starting to show up and you’ve got a lot of limbs broken that are hanging in the trees and when they fall they fall on a power line,” Rhodes said. “An email just went out to not release the crews until Sunday until we see what is going to happen with this weather that is coming through tomorrow. That way we’ll have a bunch of people to jump on it if something happens.”