NEW ORLEANS — On Tuesday, New Orleans City Council members spent three hours questioning and critiquing the city’s biggest utility services as they tried to get answers from residents. Throughout the meeting councilmembers continuously said residents deserve reliability.
“There has to be something done that is different,” Councilmember Joe Giarrusso said.
Entergy was in the hot seat for about an hour as they discussed reasons for outages. Entergy leaders said outages have decreased but council members still had concerns.
“By the 1,583 outages, and they’ve calculated that over 177,000 people had been impacted by those outages, so there’s your number,” Councilmember Lesli Harris said about an outage event in her district.
Entergy claims weather and vegetation are behind many of their issues.
“We’ve had a rash of weather events come through this year that have affected our reliability,” an Entergy representative said.
But council members say that as weather becomes increasingly volatile due to climate change, the utility service needs to get ahead of it. Entergy says it is trying to be proactive.
“They’re detecting if a transformer is going to fail, they’re seeing if there are service issues, so now we’re coming to customer's homes and saying hi, neighbor. We’re detecting an issue. You didn’t call us, but we need to do checks on your system,” Steven Benyard, VP of Reliability for Entergy, said.
After Entergy, the council heard from the Sewerage and Water Board and the Department of Public Works about drainage consolidation and clearing of catch basins.
“About two and a half million pounds of debris were removed and just under 4,000 catch basins,” Rick Hathaway, director of Public Works, said.
Throughout the meeting council members expressed the need for better communication from every service provider, saying consistent updates would be a step in the right direction.
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