NEW ORLEANS — In a city like New Orleans where for the most part, the power lines are above ground and there are a lot of trees, there is always a risk of power outages during bad weather.
That was certainly the case on Wednesday as high winds in advance of a strong band of showers caused isolated outages across the Metro area.
A crew working for Entergy New Orleans quickly repaired a power line near Audubon Street and Pritchard Place.
About 2400 customers lost electricity for a time in the Marlyville-Fontainebleau neighborhood. Later Wednesday afternoon, another 2,100 customers had lost power in Mid-City.
Sarah Cooper says her lights went out shortly after 11, Wednesday morning.
“They said at least 2000 plus people were without power and that’s just a tell tail sign of what’s to come, I guess,” Cooper said. “That’s kind of scary.”
Entergy confirms high winds blew down a power line there, causing the outage.
“This is something that we may see throughout the evening,” ENO VP Sandra Diggs-Miller said. “We are hopeful and prayerful that we will not have catastrophic events of the tornadoes that occurred last week. But there may be situations where a line may come down. There may be some impacts to our poles.”
Diggs-Miller says utility crews have been on call for the past 24 hours.
“Watching the weather, talking about where our resources will be staged and at this point, we realize this is going to be a fast-moving storm and we have our crews in position to be able to respond as soon as the weather passes.”
Entergy has also spent the past few days trimming tree branches and other vegetation near power lines.
“We proactively went out and viewed our system, just to see where we could find those areas that may have some vulnerabilities,” Diggs-Miller said. “That’s one thing we always do, not just when a storm is coming.”
In the meantime, it will be a restless evening for residents across the Metro area until the storm passes.
“It’s definitely scary,” Cooper said. “I actually just dropped off some lunch to my aunt, downtown and she was like do not park under any branches. I said I don’t know how to do that. There are trees everywhere.”
Entergy is also warning residents not to approach any downed lines.
You should treat all of them as if they are energized.
If you see a downed line or a transformer sparking, you are urged to call 1-800-ENTERGY to report it.