Hurricane Delta made landfall in Louisiana on the evening of Oct. 9 with 100 mph winds and a 10-foot storm surge, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of people who were still recovering from Hurricane Laura which hit the same region in August.
Delta has been downgraded to a tropical depression, but not before leaving roughly 575,000 thousand customers without electricity as of late morning Oct. 10, according to poweroutage.us.
Tropical storm force winds will persist throughout the day and heavy rainfall will lead to flash flooding and minor river flooding as Delta moves northeast into portions of the lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys and into the Southern Appalachians, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Entergy Louisiana, which serves over a million customers, had over 300,000 customer outages on the morning of Oct. 10, poweroutage.us data showed, and regional utility Cleco, serving 288,000 customers in Louisiana, had 124,861 outages, according to an emailed statement.
Entergy did not have any generating plants knocked offline due to the storm, which includes the investor-owned utility's 992-MW River Bend-1 nuclear power plants in Louisiana and the 1.5-GW Grand Gulf-1 plant in Mississippi, spokesman Jerry Nappi said in an email.
The 1.2-GW Waterford-3 nuclear plant located in Louisiana had been previously shut down for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage, Nappi noted.
"Now that the storm has passed and conditions are improving, damage assessments will begin by land and air, and crews will begin making any necessary system repairs and restoring power," James Lass, Cleco's director of distribution operations and emergency management, said in the statement.
"We follow our storm restoration plan, focusing our efforts on critical infrastructure such as water and sewage systems, hospitals and medical facilities, and then moving to the circuits with the largest number of customers until power is restored to all customers," Lass said.
