Michael Considine, the Vice President for Power Delivery Operations of Entergy, spoke with AccuWeather on Sept. 12 to explain how their crews are working to restore power to thousands.
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00:00Energy provides energy to more than one million Louisiana customers.
00:04Michael Considine is Vice President for Power Delivery Operations for Energy,
00:09and that is a high-stakes job in a situation like this. So, Michael, you joined us
00:14yesterday and a couple days ago to talk about the plans ahead of the storm. So,
00:19did Hurricane Francine have maybe a greater or less impact on the grid that you anticipated?
00:25Well, thanks for having me again, Jeff. Well, you know, every storm's different.
00:31Obviously, Francine came across as a Category 2 at landfall. The track was a little bit east
00:37of where we anticipated. It dropped a lot of rain, as you know, and so we luckily,
00:44like we always do, we're prepared with adequate resources and we're able to quickly adapt to the
00:50little bit easterly track than what we originally thought, and we're able to respond and start
00:54restoration and damage assessment at daylight this morning, and pleased to announce that,
00:59you know, we're making great progress so far in our restoration and are making great progress to
01:05returning our customers' lives to normal. Very good. The majority of the power outages,
01:11at least by percentage of customers, were predictably in the area very close to landfall,
01:17some of the parishes like Terrebonne right along the Gulf Coast. Is it a little more difficult to
01:22restore power, even though maybe the volume of outages may be lower? Is it more difficult there?
01:28Are there more remote areas? Well, it does present certainly its own challenges in that area. I mean,
01:35a lot of marshland, for sure, so we have a lot of specialized equipment we use in that area.
01:41Marsh buggies, for example, airboats, we have all that equipment in place,
01:44pre-staged in those areas. We use quite a few helicopters to do the damage assessment.
01:50Those helicopters were in the air at first daylight, scouting and doing damage assessments
01:55so that we can get the materials in place and get the lines back in the air and the poles back in
02:00the ground. You know, that damage assessment is going on as well as just restoration where we
02:06can do so without having to replace equipment. We've seen great results from where we've,
02:12in previous storms, been able to build back to stronger standards in those areas where we've
02:18been able to do that from previous hurricanes. Those areas fared very well, so we're pleased
02:22with those results and where we have to go back and repair today and in the days to come. We expect
02:28to have great results in future storms that we know will happen. That's good to hear. Regarding
02:34safety for the crews that are out today, I know it's a little breezy still, but certainly the
02:37strongest winds are pulling away to the north, so is the wind and is the ongoing residual flooding
02:44much of a safety concern at this point, or are we kind of below those thresholds?
02:49We're below those thresholds. We're able to work in all areas of our service territory. There's no
02:54weather concerns at this point. You know, we had the storm obviously go up all the way through
02:59Mississippi that we serve. We expect to be able to wrap up the majority, if not all, of the
03:04energy Mississippi customers that we serve today. You know, if we have an outage or two pop up
03:09today, that might go into tomorrow, but anybody impacted from Princeton should be restored today
03:14in Mississippi. Obviously, we're working through providing estimations to estimated
03:19restoration times to our customers in Louisiana and Energy New Orleans later today, but we're
03:26making great progress on that effort. All right. Well, we appreciate all that you and the crews
03:31that you work with are doing to restore power to more and more people there in Mississippi,
03:37Louisiana, and beyond. Thanks again for joining us. Michael Considine,
03:40Vice President for Power Delivery Operations with Entergy.
03:45Thanks for having me. All right. Thank you, Michael. And as we take a look at the current
03:49state-by-state outages, again, Michael was speaking on behalf of Entergy. If we were to
03:52look at all customers that we are aware of through the poweroutage.us resources,
03:58among all different companies, here you can see some of the numbers there. And again,
04:02not all these are specifically from Entergy, but from various different co-ops and energy
04:06companies there. Still looking at well over 350,000 addresses without power across the South
04:13with a trend upwards in Tennessee, but downwards in Louisiana. We're seeing that trend continue.
04:20It seems that every hour we're seeing about 10,000 to 15,000 addresses restored in Louisiana,
04:26which is good news. Still the most challenging areas, what Michael talked about there,
04:30Terrebonne Parish there near Houma, where a tremendous percentage of customers there are
04:36without power.