BELLE CHASSE, La. — After losing power multiple times this month, residents and business owners in Belle Chasse say they’re concerned about the increase in outages during hurricane season.
Once a week, Michael Alphonso closes the doors to Alphonso’s Seafood in Belle Chase to clean and organize his freezers.
When he came in Wednesday morning, the lights and freezers were off.
“The seals on everything were pretty new, so we only gained about six degrees on the walk in and the fridge stayed pretty cool,” Alphonso said.
Thankfully, his power came back on a couple of hours later, but he says an outage last month cost him a full night of business.
“That was a complete killer. That day we were doing really well. We had a big lunch rush, and we were expecting an even bigger dinner rush, but we shut down,” Alphonso said.
According to Entergy, Wednesday's outage was caused by a tree that fell on equipment, three other recent outages were caused by another company’s collapsed pole, a lightning strike, and load strain.
Across town, Roeann Parsiola’s power went out on Wednesday too.
“It’s just inconvenient for me,” Parsiola said.
She says a lack of communication from Entergy has her feeling left in the dark.
“I hope they can get their act together before we have to evacuate or get a storm. I feel bad for the elderly or people on oxygen or people sick,” Parsiola said.
Entergy claims despite the recent outages, they’re prepared to respond quickly this hurricane season.
“The Louisiana Public Service Commission recently approved a plan to harden the grid statewide, and we look forward to working with the New Orleans City Council to bring the same level of protection to our customers here in the City,” Entergy officials said.
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