NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Two power outages within 24 hours left thousands of New Orleans residents in the dark on an otherwise clear day.
What happened?
Entergy executives held a press conference Wednesday afternoon to address the aging system and increase focus on the reliability improvements that are currently being made and that still need to be advanced.
There are approximately 30,000 lightning rods in Orleans Parish. A lightning rod is used to protect the system from electrical surges, most commonly caused by lightning strikes.
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About 700 of these surge protection devices are “substation arresters,” two of which failed overnight.
One left power out in the Fairgrounds, Gentilly and Treme areas for a few hours, while the other knocked out power in Uptown on Wednesday morning.
According to Entergy, the arresters were damaged by the increasing frequency of lightning strikes before another event caused their failure, or, as the utility put it, their “activation.”
“We had a huge storm last week,” said Steven Benyard, Entergy’s vice president of resilience. “The lightning rods were severely damaged. But also if a tree branch causes a fault in a line, if someone hits a pole or if there’s any fault in the line, the lightning rod will detect that burst of energy and activate, depending on its tolerance.”
The arresters protect more valuable equipment that would take longer and be more expensive to repair and restore power in the event of an outage, Benyard said.
“A lightning rod may cost a few thousand dollars, but the damage it saves to our system could be millions of dollars,” he said.
Benyard said Entergy has identified about 138 of the 700 arresters in the substations that need to be replaced. The utility has replaced 24 so far.
“We live here too. We’re working on all of this. We continue to invest in what’s important to each of our customers,” said Deanna Rodriguez, president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans. “If there was a storm a few days ago, you would have seen impacts on the infrastructure that need to be addressed, and that’s what we plan to do.”
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