Entergy officials told a New Orleans City Council Committee they would fast track additional efforts to improve critter mitigation following a pair of high-profile animal-related outages earlier this month.
Entergy Vice President of Transmission Asset Management Michelle Bourg laid out how a bird was able to take down the Julia Street Derbigny Substation despite exiting mitigation efforts.
“We believe that the bird was perched on some of the support steel for our substation equipment, which is grounded so it is zero potential, and for some reason swung its wing open, and that wing was able to defeat the animal mitigation that we have in place that protects some of the switches in the yard,” said Bourg.
Council VP JP Morrell was not impressed by the explanation.
“Birds extending their wings is a pretty foreseeable occurrence, in that if a bird extending its wing defeated the animal mitigation measures I think that perhaps future animal mitigation measures should include birds extending their wings.
Council President Helena Moreno noted Derbigny Substation was also taken out last year by a bird
“We had an EF 3 or 4 tornado that came through and knocked out power to 8,948 people, and then we had a bird that knocked out power to more people than that,” said Moreno.
Entergy officials discussed the station’s current mitigation measures and vowed to implement new measures, such as harmless laser lights that hopefully will drive the birds away.
“We recognize that this sounds incredulous that a bird caused so much damage to our equipment, and although it does sound absurd, animal interferences with utility infrastructure cause a significant risk in our entire industry,” said Entergy VP of Regulatory Affairs Courtney Nicholson.
