NEW ORLEANS — Thousands of Entergy New Orleans customers lost power overnight.
Tuesday night roughly 6,500 lost power in the Gentilly, Fairgrounds, and Tremé neighborhoods.
Then, early Wednesday morning, more than 7,000 Uptown customers were in the dark.
Entergy New Orleans officials addressed the outages on Wednesday afternoon and claimed that "lightning arresters" failed.
“These arresters not only protect against lightning, but they protect against surges. So, the whole goal of these systems is to ensure that we have shorter duration outages and less catastrophic, less costly outages," Steven Benyard, VP of Reliability, said.
The arresters activate during a surge or lightning, and we may never notice, but over time they wear down, the utility said.
Aging infrastructure combined with last week's storms are to blame for Tuesday night's outage, Benyard said.
Deanna Rodriguez, President and CEO of Entergy New Orleans said while the equipment ultimately failed Tuesday night, it worked as it should.
“We have seen a 130 percent increase in lightning strikes just this year affecting that aging infrastructure," Rodriguez said.
Entergy N.O. officials said there are 30,000 arresters across Orleans Parish. The utility has identified that 138 arresters need to be replaced. So far, they've replaced 24, Benyard said.
The replacement is more modern, weather-resistant arresters.
“Each arresters a few thousand dollars," Benyard said.
Entergy and its regulator, the New Orleans City Council, have gone back and forth over who should pay to upgrade the utility's 70-year-old infrastructure.
“To me, the most important thing is, this is what we are doing to prevent it from happening again," Councilmember for District A, Joe Giarrusso, said.
Benyard said they look at trends and inspect arresters monthly to update a running list of which ones need to be replaced.
Entergy said the arresters that impact the Superdome and 'key areas' for the Super Bowl have already been replaced.
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