LITTLE ROCK, Ark — It almost seems like a never ending battle – just as Entergy was almost done fixing the damages from Wednesday night’s storms – round two hit yesterday and power was out once again.
There is now growing frustration for several customers as they are left wondering when their lights will turn back on.
If you go onto Entergy’s website there is an easy and accessible map that customers can use to find exact locations and the amount of outages in a certain area.
You can also personalize your search by clicking on “View My Outage” and it will give you details on when your lights are scheduled to turn back on.
According to Entergy, around 6:00 p.m. on Monday there was about 4,000 customers without power and their original peak was 85,000 on Wednesday night.
“We work very hard to build a resilient system and one that is safe and reliable. Mother nature is quite the force,” Chris Brown, the Director of Operations for Entergy’s Central Region, said.
He called this power outage a historic event.
“It's very significant. Especially whenever you think about we were very close to 100% restoration yesterday and then round two,” Brown said.
Entergy currently has 2,500 utility employees working nonstop on the power lines.
“Some of those are Entergy Arkansas employees and then the rest are going to be employees that we have brought in from other states and even other companies to come in and help out with the restoration effort,” Brown said.
He said they made these calls Wednesday night when they recognized the severity of the storm.
“I mean we really don't like our customers being in an inconvenience so this is just one way we can help get everybody back to their normal routine,” Brown said.
For customers to better understand the repairing process and how they decide what to work on and when, Entergy has broken it down into 6 simple steps:
- Step one: Assess the damage.
- Step two: Restore power plants, since they are the primary source of production.
- Step three: Restore the transmission lines to power cities and towns.
- Step four: Restore power for emergency services.
- Step five: Restore areas where the largest number of homes and businesses are located.
- Step six: Restore individual services
“From what our customers experience it might look very inefficient at times. There's a lot of moving pieces that go into the restoration effort,” Brown said.
He said a huge part of these moving pieces are the selfless working lineman who don’t stop.
“They are a unique and brave bunch,” Brown said.
He said they are hopeful 100% of their customers will be restored by Tuesday evening.
If you have a power outage, make sure you report it to Entergy because they may not know about all of them.