NEW ORLEANS — We're learning more about what caused Tuesday night's power outage in New Orleans. Entergy said a piece of equipment called a lightning arrester failed. Now they're looking to resiliency plans in hopes of limiting these types of things from happening.
WWL Louisiana's Alyssa Curtis was at the Entergy substation and they said the grid is about 70 years old.
Entergy said lightning arresters activated and that caused the power outage. The piece of equipment protects against lightning and surges. Entergy showed WWL that one failed and how degraded it is.
Entergy said that sometimes nothing happens when they fail, and that wasn't the case Tuesday night.
They said a fault occurred.
"Last week we had a huge thunderstorm roll through our system….depending on the tolerance that’s when they activate," an Entergy spokesperson said during a press conference.
Entergy said 138 arresters need to be replaced. So far they've replaced 24.
On Wednesday, Curtis spoke with Council member Joe Giarrusso. He's frustrated as he said outages in general are becoming far too frequent.
"What’s more important to me is I don’t have power [and] I’m sitting in the middle of DeSaix somewhere," Giarrusso said. "This is how long it’s going to last, this is what happened. And to me, the most important thing is, this is what we’re doing to prevent it from happening again. That to me is really the lesson in all of this," he said.
Entergy said the most important thing is to invest in resiliency. They said things like Artificial Intelligence can help strengthen the aging grid.
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