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NEW ORLEANS — The entire New Orleans area south of Lake Pontchartrain is expected to be without power for weeks because all eight of Entergy’s transmission lines delivering electricity from the outside world failed simultaneously.
Hurricane Ida’s intense winds turned one of the main transmission towers into a heap of twisted and rusted metal along River Road at the edge of Bridge City. //
It was a staggering sight for a tower that rose 400 feet above the Avondale Shipyard and supported power lines across a 3,800 foot span to a tower across the Mississippi River in Harahan. On Monday, those same power lines could be seen in drone footage overhead, dunked into the muddy river.
That’s only one of the entry points that failed, leaving Entergy customers on what the utility officially calls an “island.” Entergy says it’s trying to assess and investigate what it acknowledged was a “catastrophic transmission failure” and scrambling to figure out how to restore power.
Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May said that assessment period will take at least four days, after which more than 20,000 restoration workers will pursue at least two tracks to get the lights back on:
Getting at least one of the failed transmission lines back up and running, or by generating power from within the island itself, using the power station at Nine Mile Point, or by firing up the new power plant at Michoud, in New Orleans East. //
The second option, creating a self-generated power source from within the “island,” is not ideal, but will be pursued at the same time. First, to use the 230 megawatts of power that can be generated at the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy still needs to restore enough transmission lines to deliver electricity to customers. //
In addition to the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy hopes to generate another 400 megawatts at the Nine Mile power station and use large generators to push the total electricity on the “island” above 600 megawatts. That would be enough to provide critical power to services and infrastructure but not enough for all customers to be restored, Moreno said.
