HOUMA, La. — Terrebonne Parish President Jason Bergeron drove up to the Eddison power substation in Houma Sunday night after 6,000 customers, including his own family, lost electricity.
“Not far from where I’m standing, we found a raccoon, unfortunately, the second raccoon in about two weeks,” Bergeron said.
For the second time in as many weeks, a raccoon got caught up in the lines of the Terrebonne Parish Utilities’ Facility causing a major outage.
“This is something real,” Bergeron said. “This is something that we’re dealing with. I know it’s icing on top of the cake. It’s another outage. It’s another issue. Is it the infrastructure? We’re still battling back three years after Ida.”
Neighbors in the Sugar Mill Point subdivision were among those who went dark during the latest outage and another a week earlier.
“You would think nowadays there would be ways of protecting rodents, animals from getting into critical parts of the system that would cause that kind of outage,” Perry Dufresne said.
“The power outage went out for about 40 minutes and then everybody’s generators were kicking on,” Shane Duplantis said. “I would definitely like to see them maybe improve on maybe some of their equipment or just do better.”
Terrebonne Parish is now in the process of conducting a root cause analysis of the latest two power outages. President Bergeron says the fact that there have been 20 outages since he took office in January, points to a vulnerability in the electrical system.
“Is this a smaller issue? Is this part of a bigger issue? What can we do as far as infrastructure goes to work and make sure we minimize these outages.”
The utility is in the process of making 800 repairs to the system.
The parish also hopes to begin rebuilding the utility’s power plant that was damaged during Hurricane Ida with FEMA dollars early next year.
For now, Entergy Louisiana is supplying electricity to power the grid in Houma.
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