Hurricane Ida wiped out all power sources in the Big Easy in a matter of hours on Sunday, according to Entergy.
The painfully slow-moving storm trounced both New Orleans and Baton Rouge and caused more than a million concurrent outages in Louisiana.
By midnight Monday, Ida darkened all of Orleans Parish, including New Orleans.
The storm blew a nearby transmission tower into the Mississippi River. Soon after, all eight transmission lines feeding the city went offline, causing a load imbalance that forced Entergy’s generation offline.
At 9:30 p.m. Entergy New Orleans tweeted it was making “every effort to learn more and rectify.” The utility said it provided back-up generation to the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board.
Entergy characterized the transmission damage as “catastrophic.” It confirmed that the only power to be had in the city Sunday night was being supplied by temporary generators, a fact that Homeland Security also reported.
“We are currently working to assess damage and identify a path forward to restore power, to those who can take it, in the area,” Entergy NOLA said in a short update Sunday night.
Late Sunday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that President Biden approved his request for a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration in every parish in the state.
The storm made landfall near Port Fourchon, La., on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s land debut.
As the outer bands began pounding Louisiana, Entergy New Orleans warned that residents in the hardest-hit areas could lose power for the better part of a month.
“Based on historical restoration times, customers in the direct path of a storm as intense as Ida may experience outages for more than three weeks. Customers in the hardest-hit areas should plan for the possibility of experiencing extended power outages,” the utility tweeted Aug. 29.
Within the first 30 minutes of the 1 p.m. ET landfall, more than 100,000 ratepayers in Louisiana lost power, according to www.poweroutage.us. The number steadily increased to 300,000 by 3 p.m.
MISO declared conservative operations for its Louisiana balancing authorities two days before landfall and through midnight on Aug. 31. The RTO said the storm had the potential to damage transmission and generation.
MISO Senior Director of Reliability Coordination Jessica Lucas said MISO evaluated Entergy’s damage predictions ahead of the storm.
Entergy said it activated its mutual aid assistance plan and secured “crews from at least 22 states and D.C.” to aid in the restoration process. The company also said it secured the use of drones, helicopters, marsh buggies and high-water vehicles.
Entergy also said it’s been storm-hardening its system in recent years, raising flood-vulnerable substations, replacing transmission near the coast with steel structures “and installing ‘isolation’
devices on lines to reduce outages.”
Hurricane Ida tied last year’s Hurricane Laura and the 1856 Last Island Hurricane as the strongest to hit Louisiana. Ida minted Louisiana as the first state to experience hurricanes with 150-mph-plus winds in two consecutive years.
“Over the past year, we’ve reviewed lessons learned from the historic 2020 hurricane season with our members to prepare and respond to the impacts of tropical storms and hurricanes,” MISO South Executive Director Daryl Brown said in a press release. “Keeping the grid safe and reliable is critical to our industry and the customers we serve.”
The new storm comes as MISO is still resettling about one-eighth of the pricing impacts associated with Hurricane Laura, which caused about $90 million in congestion costs. (See MISO Keeps Advisories in Effect a Week After Laura.)
