Earlier this month about ten thousand Entergy New Orleans customers lost power in a bird-related incident, the latest in a string of assaults on the grid by small animals over the last two decades. Today a City Council Committee will have Entergy explain just exactly why these small critters are able to terrorize the city so easily.
“We will walk through how a bird was able to cause that much damage and what mitigation we do have in place at our substations, which is quite a bit, but there is always a chance to look at industry best practices,” said Councilwoman Leslie Harris at a Council committee meeting a few weeks back.
Just a few days after that major CBD outage a squirrel knocked out power to a section of the Lake Front.
Councilman JP Morrell said the bigger issue of the city’s overall fragile energy grid has to be addressed.
“The reliability is so unreliable that during any weather event people are gathering water, gathering batteries,” said Morrell.
