Aug 31, 2021 6:18 PM

What It'll Take to Get Power Back in New Orleans After Hurricane Ida

It could take weeks to get the lights on in parts of Louisiana, but the playbook on how to do it is clear.

Two days after Hurricane Ida tore through, New Orleans and its surrounding area remain almost totally without power. Levees, floodwalls, floodgates, pumps, and other protections prevented massive flooding, but Ida knocked out all eight transmission lines into the city, plunging it and nearby parishes into darkness. Getting the lights back on will be an arduous process that doesn't yet have a clear timeline—but it starts with a massive reconnaissance effort.

On Monday, there were about a million customers without power in Louisiana and roughly 50,000 in south Mississippi as a result of the storm. Regional electric utility Entergy said on Tuesday that it had already restored power to tens of thousands of customers and that 840,000 were still without power in Louisiana, plus 25,000 in Mississippi.

Entergy and other local utilities says they will need days to complete preliminary scouting and debris removal as they triage the situation. "Electricity is practically nonexistent for most people in Southeast Louisiana," Governor John Bel Edwards said on Monday evening. "I can't tell you when the power is going to be restored and tell you when all the debris is going to be cleaned up, and repairs made, and so forth." Edwards reiterated on Tuesday that his office had no estimate for when power would return.

The utilities warn that it could take three weeks or more to restore power to every single customer, an estimate based on past recovery times, like after Hurricane Gustav in 2008 and Isaac in 2012. After Hurricane Katrina's devastation in 2005, it took about 40 days for power to come back across the region.

Those repeated disasters mean that utilities have a recovery playbook for storms like Ida. But knowing what order to run those plays in depends entirely on the unique conditions left behind by each hurricane—which regions remain inaccessible for days due to flooding and which specific components of the system need extensive repairs.

Taking Inventory

Assessing the damage starts with a massive effort from more than 20,000 utility workers, a force drawn from both local employees and reinforcements from other utilities around the country. In addition to driving around to check equipment along every inch of local power lines, crews also assess failures and damage at power plants, voltage transformer stations, and substations. Crews use drones and helicopters to conduct aerial surveys as well. And while they wait for floodwaters to recede, they take boats to start getting a handle on the damage in areas that remain underwater.

One of the most important components to evaluate in the Ida recovery is the condition of the transmission system. Main transmission lines make up the backbone of a power grid, conveying high-voltage electricity over long distances to connect electric generation sites like power plants with the substations that feed local power lines to customers.

New Orleans has eight of these high-voltage transmission lines; Entergy said on Tuesday that it was still working to understand the failures along each of them. In parallel, the company is working to repair its power plants; ideally, they're ready to produce power by the time the transmission system is able to deliver it. Entergy says it is also exploring the possibility of using local generators to feed power lines directly without the need for a fully operational transmission system.

Just outside New Orleans, a tall transmission tower, also known as a lattice tower, fell on Sunday night as a result of Ida's strong winds. The tower, which had memorably remained standing during Hurricane Katrina, dumped its power lines and conductor into the Mississippi River as it collapsed. Crews will need to rebuild the tower and replace all of its equipment, a time-consuming construction process. Depending on the condition of other transmission lines, the project could become a choke point or simply one of the many parallel efforts.

“The damage from Hurricane Ida has eliminated much of the redundancy built into the transmission system, which makes it difficult to move power around the region to customers,” Entergy said in a statement on Tuesday.

The blackout has far-reaching implications for basic functions in New Orleans. Residents who remained in the city still have access to clean drinking water, but the Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans said on Monday that it was using generators at drainage and pumping stations around the city and was struggling to keep up with demand. As of midday on Tuesday, New Orleans itself was not under “boil water” orders, but some suburbs were.

“I was sitting in my dark house by myself as the wind was shrieking around me,” says longtime New Orleans resident and journalist John Pope of his experience on Sunday as Ida passed through. “My house is 115 years old. It’s sturdy, and it held up. I don’t leave during hurricanes. I never leave, because I own this house and I would really feel bad about being away from it. But this has persuaded me to actually invest in a generator. Without electricity in late August in southern Louisiana it's extremely hot. This is no one’s idea of a good time.”

Many longtime New Orleans residents have become accustomed to long power outages, especially after the devastation of Katrina. They prep generators if they have them, empty their refrigerators and freezers, and charge external batteries to power their smartphones. But extended blackouts are dangerous for even the most seasoned residents, exposing them to intense summer heat without relief and generally leaving them without access to basic services.

Ida's destruction and power outages also arrived at a time when hospitals and intensive care units in New Orleans and Louisiana were already overwhelmed by an influx of Covid-19 patients. In some areas that suffered blackouts, health care workers had to manually pump air into the lungs of patients' on respirators while they waited to be evacuated to other floors or other hospitals.

Order of Operations

The most daunting aspect of the grid recovery process is that even when utilities have a clear enough sense of the damage, they won't be able to simply flip a switch and restore power. Instead they need to strategically re-energize portions of the grid while balancing the electrical load. If energy supply and demand aren't even, a grid needs the ability to store excess power in the transmission system to keep the system from overloading. Seeding power haphazardly can result in power surges and fluctuations that would cause even more equipment damage and failures.

“Once they get a sense of how bad the damage is they’ll report all that information back to the engineers who are called the ‘planners to transmission’ or ‘distribution planners,’” says Chris Sistrunk, who spent more than 13 years as an engineer at Entergy and is now an industrial control system specialist at the security firm Mandiant. “And they have a model of the entire power system, so what they’ll do is try to find a path to get power back again. It’s like the nervous system; you get the backbone going and then you can start getting power out to the arms, legs, and then all the way down to the toes and fingers.”

Though he is not involved in the Ida response, Sistrunk says crews are now likely engaged in triage, assessing not just what damage has occurred on transmission lines and at power stations but what can be repaired most quickly.

Electrical lines in New Orleans' central business district are buried, so they were likely protected during the storm. But even neighborhoods with little or no proximal line damage must wait for upstream fixes at key power plants, substations, and main transmission lines for the lights to come back on, unless Entergy can cobble together some power from backup generators.

“They're going to coordinate to find which artery or transmission line to get going again,” Sistrunk says. “You try to find the combination of transmission lines with the least amount of damage to get them turned back on. There’s no one right way, because every storm is different.”

Ida's devastation raises questions, though, about the resilience of New Orleans–area electrical infrastructure. Two newly opened natural gas power plants near the city were built specifically with hurricane preparedness in mind, since natural gas is abundant in the area and relatively easy to deliver during natural disasters. They clearly did not succeed, though, in keeping power up this time. It is also still unclear why all eight major transmission lines went down. The path to recovery would likely be easier if some of those were still functioning. Understanding these failures will be key to both restoring power now and reinforcing electrical infrastructure for the future.

Longtime New Orleans resident Steve Beatty, who evacuated right before Katrina and again with his family last week to Houston, emphasizes that there is a cumulative toll from multiple, overlapping disasters like past storms and the pandemic.

“Many people who were evacuating from New Orleans this weekend drove through the Lake Charles area of Louisiana and could see the telltale signs of destruction and struggle and lack of recovery from two storms they faced last year,” he told WIRED. “I think it's triggering to see the blue tarps still on roofs like we saw after Katrina.”

As the major blackouts and grid infrastructure failures in New Orleans show, it's increasingly common to be faced with a new natural disaster before you've had a chance to implement the lessons from the last one.