Entergy Says Issac Taking Toll In Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi

Entergy Corp. officials say more than 769,000 utility customers have been knocked offline by Hurricane Issac in a three-state region.

At its peak early Thursday morning, Isaac left 769,458 customers in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi without power, making it the fourth-most damaging storm in Entergy history in terms of outages.

The only storms with larger customer impacts have been Katrina with 1.1 million affected customers, Gustav with 964,000 and Rita with 800,000, the company said.

“Isaac stuck around longer than anyone wanted and continues to cause significant challenges as we work to restore power as quickly and as safely as possible,” said Greg Grillo, Entergy’s incident storm commander. “We planned for the worst, and despite the initial obstacles, our team of more than 12,000 is hard at work repairing damage and getting the lights back on for our customers as safely and quickly as possible. Our crews will work 16 hours every day until we restore power to all of our customers who can take power.”

As of close of business on Thursday, nearly 100,000 customers had power restored.

Entergy said a total of 30 transmission substations were out in Louisiana and Mississippi. In addition, the number of damaged transmission lines included one in Entergy Arkansas, 13 in Entergy Mississippi, 34 in Entergy Louisiana, three in Entergy New Orleans and 12 in Entergy Gulf States Louisiana.

No Entergy fossil or nuclear power plants were damaged by the storm, and employees at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant began preparing to restart the plant Thursday afternoon. The plant, located 25 miles from New Orleans, was safely shut down Tuesday in advance of Isaac’s landfall, Entergy said.