KENNER, La. — Neighbors on Daniel Street in Kenner’s Rivertown spent the morning digging out from a heavy band of overnight thunderstorms.
Tiffany Reites woke up to downed trees, tree limbs, and powerlines.
“I was actually up in the living room and around 11:30 you could hear the winds starting, the rain was getting really hard, and the lights started flickering,” Reites said. “Thank goodness we have a generator and then you could hear all the debris flying.”
Phil Adams watched as the wind knocked down the power pole in front of the home.
“We noticed that the pole that used to be right there was snapped and the only thing preventing it from going into the street, is that it was caught by the AT&T line that goes across,” Adams said.
There were significant outages in Kenner and the western half of Jefferson Parish, and we now know why.
Entergy VP of Customer Service Michelle Bourg told us two of the transmission lines that feed Entergy’s Pontchartrain and U-city substations tripped offline during the storm.
“We were very quick, once we were able to deploy resources, once the storm passed to execute some switching to reroute the power to bring in power from other sources into the infrastructure to serve homes and businesses in the area.
Kirk Bullinger complimented Entergy crews for responding quickly.
Part of his backyard patio cover ended up tangled in powerlines across the street.
He said despite the damage and power outages, things could have been a lot worse.
“Just some vinyl fencing and aluminum that’s been blown and some tree limbs, a little bit of car damage here and there, but other than that everybody’s safe,” Bullinger said. “That’s the most important part.”
With more possible severe weather in the forecast – Entergy is preparing for another rough night.
“We are aware that the forecast is not a favorable one for us or the communities we serve, and should we experience that weather, we’ll be ready for it,” Bourg said. “For us, it would be part three. We had some very significant weather move through the western part of the state on Monday night and we were really in cleanup mode for that when this number two punch got dealt to us. If number three gets dealt, we’ll be ready for it. We’re constantly monitoring the weather.”
There were wind gusts of more than 80 miles per hour overnight in south Kenner.
Neighbors hope if bad weather hits again, Mother Nature will be a little kinder and spare them additional damage.
“It brings back a lot of emotions because it’s just here we go again,” Reites said. “No two storms are the same. You never know what’s going to happen.
“It happened to be recycling day,” Adams said. “I’m sure all my recycling is on the Westbank right now.”
According to Entergy, more than 100,000 customers across Louisiana lost power during the peak of the outages Friday morning, and about 70 percent of the customers were powered back up by mid-afternoon.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.