NEW ORLEANS — An Algiers man says he had to leave his home Sunday because he had no A/C.
He says he and his neighbors in English Turn have lost power three times over the last couple of weeks, and they've had enough.
Dr. Billy Hawkins told WWL Louisiana, "I have been extremely concerned about the power outages in English Turn."
Hawkins moved to English Turn two years ago, saying, "Storm season just started. We've had no storms, but in English Turn, we've had approximately three power outages."
Most recently, he says his neighborhood lost power three times in the last few weeks. Sunday night, they lost power for nine hours. Without A/C, he had to find a cool spot to wait out the outage. "It's very frustrating. We ended up going to sit in Applebee's for four to five hours," he said.
Margeaux Fanning with the English Turn Property Owners Association has been tracking the outages. Fanning said, "The length of time has been anywhere from half an hour to last night, which was almost nine hours."
She says those in Algiers have had enough, saying, "It's extremely frustrating and you're trying to do anything, it's not only hot, you have laundry to do, or you're going to be cooking."
Fanning and Dr. Hawkins are asking why they're losing power when there hasn't been any bad weather.
"But if it's just a clear sunny day and the middle of the afternoon and your power services go down and you don't have any explanation, it's troublesome," she said.
Entergy New Orleans says Sunday's outage was caused by two AT&T poles coming down. City Councilman JP Morrell tweeted that the poles came down because they were rotted out.
Entergy New Orleans says it doesn't own the poles that came down, but it uses them.
Scott said, "We don't own all the poles in the city. There are about 96,000 poles; we own about 45,000 of them, so if there's a pole, we have an attachment agreement... So we can use their poles, and they can use ours... Our facilities were attached to poles that fell, and that's what caused the outage."
Scott says the outages English Turn residents have experienced recently have been out of their control, saying, "The other two go back to May; one was a lightning strike, and unfortunately, we can't control the weather.... The first one was a load issue... Our lower coast substation had a fire back in January."
Residents, however, just want assurances that they'll have power this storm season. Dr. Hawkins said, "I hope that they really look at their equipment if that's what's feeling and replace it. It doesn't make sense for us to go through this."
An AT&T spokesperson said, "The fallen poles were replaced yesterday. We regularly inspect and replace utility poles as needed. Concerns about utility poles can be reported at (800) 288-2020."
The company said, "We continually invest in our networks. From 2019-2023, we invested nearly $2.1 billion in our wireless and wireline networks in Louisiana."
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