BATON ROUGE – A power outage cut power from traffic lights, creating a huge traffic jam during the evening commute Thursday.

Entergy reported a power outage in the Southdowns area, which impacted the light on Perkins Road at the intersection with Balis Drive. An already congested highway started to quickly grow to a crawl – at one point Thursday evening, traffic headed toward Southdowns from the Kenilworth area was stopped or slow-going to Essen. Traffic coming headed toward Southdowns from the Overpass area backed up into the Zeeland Place community. Essentially, around 5 o'clock Thursday, Perkins Road was blocked from City-Brooks Park to Essen.

Click HERE to monitor traffic flow via WBRZ's advanced traffic-tracking technology.

The power company reported the outage started at about 4 o'clock and should be repaired by 6:30 Thursday evening. 

************

Follow the publisher of this post on Twitter: @treyschmaltz