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Some 390,000 Customers Still Lack Power After Katrina

Posted on: Thursday, 15 September 2005, 09:20 CDT

NEW YORK -- Some 390,000 electricity customers still lacked power 17 days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to area utilities and the U.S. Department of Energy.

About 311,000 of the homes and businesses in Louisiana, or 28 percent, remained without power, while Mississippi had about 80,000 customers still with no service.

Katrina initially left more than 4.5 million homes and businesses without power when it struck early last week.

Entergy Corp., which restored power to all customers who can receive power in Mississippi, still has about 233,000 customers out in the heavily damaged parishes in and around New Orleans in Louisiana.

A spokesman at Entergy said the company could not estimate how long it will take to restore service to all customers, including the refineries downstream of New Orleans, since about half of the homes and buildings without power were still under water.

Southern Co.'s Mississippi Power subsidiary restored power to all customers able to receive power over the weekend of September 10-11. The company is now working with the 25,000 customers who were unable to receive power.

Some of the electrical workers helping to restore service in the Gulf Coast have returned home to the Carolinas as Hurricane Ophelia pummels the North Carolina coast.

OIL RESTORATION EFFORTS

Entergy restored power to the ConocoPhillips refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, but the customer cannot accept the power due to structural damage at the facility.

Entergy is still assessing the repairs needed to restore service to two other refineries in Louisiana without power: Exxon Mobil Corp. in Chalmette and Murphy Oil Corp. in Meraux.

The spokeswoman for the utility could not say when power would be restored to the two refineries since some of the transmission facilities serving those plants were still under water.

Even with access to electricity, it could still take the four heavily damaged refineries (three in Louisiana and one in Mississippi) months to resume operations.

POWER PLANTS

Entergy has 17 generating units in the New Orleans area fueled by natural gas and/or oil. The company has returned 10 of those units to service. Despite the outages, the utility said generating capacity is sufficient to meet demand.

Some of the biggest remaining outages include Entergy's 959-megawatt Michoud station in Orleans Parish, Louisiana and Southern's 1,047 MW Jack Watson coal-, natural gas- and oil-fired station in Harrison County, Mississippi.

Entergy was still assessing the damage at Michoud as the floodwaters around the plant recede, making the plant partially assessable, but could not yet estimate when the plant would return to service.

The hurricane seriously damaged the Watson plant, which Southern expects will take up to three months to return to service.

One MW can power 800 homes, according to North American averages.

Entergy's subsidiaries own and operate about 30,000 megawatts of generating capacity, market energy commodities and transmit and distribute power to 2.6 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Southern's subsidiaries own and operate more than 39,000 MW of generating capacity and provide power to more than 4 million customers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Source: REUTERS

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