1,300 still without power Wednesday morning amid storm cleanup
BATON ROUGE - Power crews are hard at work in the Goodwood area Tuesday following Monday's freak storm that knocked out electricity to more than 20,000 households.
Most residents will have the lights—and more importantly AC—back on by Tuesday evening, but the Forrestier family will be waiting a lot longer.
"Well we got an email just now that they'd probably come out Thursday, August 3. I know. To actually start cutting the tree. They can't do nothing until they actually move the tree off the thing," Erniest Forrestier said.
A giant tree in their back yard came down during the storm and took out a transformer and their shed.
"It was kind of frightening to be honest. I kept hearing a popping sound and I was like I don't know what that noise is because I know it wasn't supposed to be raining. So I open up my blinds and I was like, what in the world? The rain was falling so hard, the hail was actually hitting the glass and everything. When I came out the bedroom and looked out the glass door, the wind was so hard, next thing you know, the tree was actually tumbling."
They're not the only ones with this issue. Trees are down all over the neighborhood where winds gusted up to 70 miles an hour.
Entergy's most current damage report says five transmission structures, 10 distribution poles, 14 distribution crossarms, five distribution transformers and 14 spans of distribution wire need to be replaced.
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Entergy sent the following update Tuesday evening:
As of 7:30 p.m., approximately 2,400 of the 23,000 Baton Rouge area customers that were without power yesterday afternoon remain without service.
With nearly 90% of storm-affected customers restored, crews are narrowing in on the hardest-hit locations that can require more time to perform work and restores fewer amounts of customers at a time. We have more information on how we methodically restore power on our Storm Center.
While we expect the outage numbers to decrease into the night, we anticipate approximately 1,200 customers will roll into tomorrow, particularly in hard-hit areas near W. Tams Drive just northwest of Villa Del Rey Elementary School and the Broadmoor area. Both areas have a heavy tree canopy with electric equipment positioned in hard-to-access locations in the backyards of homes. This work can be challenging as it can require specialized equipment and utility workers to climb poles manually to make repairs and restore power.