— The 6,000 power line workers currently assembled in southeastern
Louisiana won’t be nearly enough to restore power to the 990,000 utility customers who are still without electricity in metropolitan New
Orleans, the region’s electricity suppliers said Wednesday.

But getting more workers to the area might be impossible until late this week because many utility crews from neighboring states are still restoring power to southern Florida, which was hit surprisingly hard by Katrina, said Chanel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corp., the state’s largest power supplier.

“There are severe limits on resources at this point,” he said. “We are told that the utilities in Florida are expected to wrap up later this week. Many of those (workers) will come directly here or to the east” in coastal Mississippi and Alabama.
The atmosphere of near-anarchy in New Orleans is another major concern, said Arthur Wiese Jr., vice president of corporate communications for Entergy.

“We can’t send workers out and put their lives in jeopardy,” he said late Wednesday afternoon from one of the company’s storm command centers in Jackson, Miss. “Once we have facilities back operating, we have to know that our workers can get to work safely.

“We are as alarmed as anyone over the chaos in the city. It is a very serious question,” Wiese said.

Those problems further validated earlier predictions by Entergy managers that many people in the hardest-hit parts of the state could be without electricity for a month or more.

Flooding and road blockage from debris remained the most immediate barriers to repair crews moving into the most damaged parts of the region.

A main transmission line running 25 miles between Madisonville and Bogalusa suffered catastrophic damage, with at least 18 miles requiring repairs, said Mark Segura, vice president of transmission and distribution services for Pineville-based Cleco Corp.

Transmission lines connect power plants to community substations and supply electricity to large numbers of customers.

Even so, by Wednesday night Entergy had restored power to 181,829 customers in Louisiana and Mississippi, mostly in areas not affected by flooding, Wiese said. “We are making good progress where we can get access.”

All of the region’s power and telephone companies were struggling to restore services in the wake of Katrina.

Nearly every customer of New Orleans-based Entergy and Pineville-based Cleco in metropolitan New Orleans remained without power Wednesday night, for the second day since the storm ripped through the region.

Communication was another problem, for utility workers as well as everyone else in southeastern Louisiana. Telephone services, over both wired and wireless networks, remained sporadic and, in some cases in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, completely dead.

Nearly 81,000 wired phone lines were dead in southeastern Louisiana, said BellSouth Corp., the state’s largest phone service provider. And more phone lines were expected to fail as backup generators at communications terminals that survived the storm ran out of fuel.

BellSouth reported several key breaks in the company’s fiber-optic line system, the backbone of its communications network.

Work crews focused on repairing major cables, firming backup power to switching centers and restoring phone service to emergency personnel, local officials and hospitals, the Atlanta-based company said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“We are doing everything possible to assess the extensive damage this destructive storm has caused,” said Bill Oliver, president of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations.

Call volume created its own problems in the parts of the network that were working. Many people trying to make calls to and from the region were met with busy signals or messages saying that circuits were busy.

Wireless phone networks experienced similar troubles.

Cingular Wireless lost at least 700 antennas, or cell sites, throughout the region, according to a company operator.

Verizon Wireless also lost portions of its network, but spokesman Patrick Kimball couldn’t say how many towers were down in the region. “Strangely enough, some cell sites are still operating on rooftops,” he said.

Wireless services were improving in Baton Rouge, Mobile, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla., where crews had easier access to damaged facilities, Kimball said. But damaged equipment in much of metropolitan New Orleans remained unreachable, he said.

“The situation could improve in certain cases and it could worsen in others. It’s such a fluid situation, it’s hard to tell,” he said.

Most of the electricity and phone companies had storm operations centers outside the metropolitan area.

Managers with Entergy, which supplies electricity to 1.2 million customers in Louisiana, are orchestrating the historic power grid restoration effort from command centers in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss.

Nearly all of the company’s employees who rode out the storm in the Hyatt Regency Hotel next to the Superdome in downtown New Orleans evacuated the city Tuesday when floodwaters continued rising in the Central Business District and other conditions in the city deteriorated. The hotel, which also served as the command center for city officials, suffered major damage during the storm.

Dan Packer, chief executive officer of Entergy’s utility in New Orleans, remained at the hotel with Mayor Ray Nagin and a handful of city officials. At 5 p.m., 693,156 Entergy customers in southeastern Louisiana, or more than half of its customer base in the state, were in the dark. Some 21,636 more were without power in central Mississippi.

With 1.1 million Entergy customers losing electricity at the peak of the storm, the outage more than quadrupled the severity of the previous high outage event for the company, which came in June with Tropical Storm Cindy, Lagarde said.

All 88,000 Cleco customers in the parishes of St. Tammany and Washington remained without power, Cleco spokeswoman Fran Phoenix said.