HOUSTON — On the edge of the Mississippi River in the Avondale community, a mangled heap of metal is all that’s left of a transmission tower that once kept the lights to a chunk of New Orleans.
Its wires were floating on the river Monday morning, no longer connected to the grid on the other side.
Officials with the power company, Entergy, said the collapsed tower is one of an unprecedented eight major power lines into the city that were inoperable. They did not immediately know the extent of damage to the other towers and offered no timetable on how soon repairs would be made.
“It would be premature for me to speculate on when power will be restored, said Deanna Rodriguez, CEO of Entergy New Orleans. “I know that’s your number one question, but until we can collect that damage assessment, we can’t give you that answer just yet."
Phillip May, president and CEO of Entergy Louisiana, would not commit to having power restored by the New Orleans Saints September 12 home opener.
The damage assessment alone may take four days, according to New Orleans city council president Helena Moreno.
Drone footage showed why that evaluation may take so long. Hurricane-force winds toppled over dozens of power poles on one stretch of road alone.
Entergy did provide initial reports showing 216 substations, 207 transmission lines, and 2,000 miles of power wires were out of service as of 10 a.m. Monday. The power company’s outage map hardly changed throughout the day, with blobs of red indicating the vast areas where power remained off.
“An army is being deployed to go help south Louisiana,” said KHOU energy expert Ed Hirs.
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A fleet of utility repair trucks, including Centerpoint crews based in Houston, are headed to the area. Entergy hopes to have an additional 20,000 boots on the ground.
“One great thing about a network construction is you can bring power in from one node or another and energize the rest of it,” Hirs said. “So they’re going to apply a triage assessment to find out which one of these nodes can be reconnected first.”