TERREBONNE PARISH, La. — The Houma Generating Station, a long-standing power plant on Barrow Street in Houma, has been sitting powerless for three years.
“We have towers back here that still need to be torn down,” said Terrebonne Parish President Jason Bergeron.
Bergeron says Hurricane Ida damaged the plant to the point it must be torn down and rebuilt. The parish released a video of the $170 million project, but Bergeron says none of it can happen because the parish is still waiting on FEMA.
“They’ve obligated $65 million. We’re looking at the other $105 million any day now, to get that funding, and with FEMA you can’t spend a dime of that until you get it,” said Bergeron.
The plant, part of parish utilities, provided power to folks in Houma. Right now, the parish is relying on Entergy and about a dozen generators. Bergeron says system-wide damage from Hurricane Ida has created a fragile system.
“We have 847 repairs that have to be made to the system-wide lines. That’s substations, that’s lines, that’s grounds, that’s everything that was damaged,” said Bergeron.
Bergeron says the damaged system has led to about 20 outages so far this year. When a raccoon inside a substation caused about 6,000 customers to lose power Sunday night, Bergeron had enough.
“To us, the raccoon is the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” said Bergeron.
Residents are tired of the outages as well.
“This is the second time in the past two weeks that we’ve had power outages. The last one, last week, was probably about an hour,” said Houma resident Shane Duplantis.
Bergeron wants plant construction to start as soon as possible. Once it does, he expects it’ll take three to five years to complete.
“It’ll be the largest and one of the projects that I would consider completing our rebuilding once it’s done,” said Bergeron.
It’s all part of continued rebuilding from a storm still impacting a community years later.
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