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Hurricane Ida: What New Orleans will need to regain strength

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Two days later Hurricane Ida was devastated, and New Orleans and its environs remain almost completely powerless. Levers, flood walls, gates, pumps, and other protections prevented major flooding, but Ida threw eight transmission lines into the city, plunging him and the surrounding parishes into darkness. Turning on the lights again will be a tedious process that doesn’t have chronological time yet, but it starts with a lot of recognition effort.

On Monday, there were about one million customers in Louisiana and approximately 50,000 in the south of Mississippi as a result of the storm. Electricity in the Entergy region said Tuesday that tens of thousands of customers had already had their energy renewed and 840,000 were still without power in Louisiana, and 25,000 in Mississippi.

Entergy and other local services say they will need days before they explore the state of preliminary exploration and debris removal. “Electricity is almost non-existent for most people in southeast Louisiana,” Governor John Bel Edwards he said on Monday evening. “I can’t tell you when the energy will be recovered, and tell you when all the waste will be cleaned, repairs done, and so on.” Edwards he repeated on Tuesday that his office had no reckoning when power would return.

Users are warned that it may take three weeks or more to return energy to each customer, an estimate based on past recovery times, such as Hurricane Gustav in 2008 and Isaac in 2012. After the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the ability to return to the entire region in about 40 days.

These repeated disasters mean that utilities have a recovery book for storms like Ida. But knowing what time these plays will take place depends on the special conditions left by each hurricane, which regional floods are inaccessible during the day, and which specific components of the system need major repairs.

Taking inventory

The damage assessment begins with a major effort by more than 20,000 employees, both from local staff and from other services across the country. In addition to driving to check the inch equipment of local power lines, crews must also assess breakdowns and damage to power plants, voltage transformer stations and substations. Crews also use drones and helicopters to conduct aerial tests. While they wait for the floodwaters to come out, they take the boats to begin controlling the damage to the flooded areas.

One of the most important components to assess in ID recovery is the state of the transmission system. The main transmission lines form the backbone of the power grid, transmitting high-voltage electricity over long distances to connect power generation sites such as power plants to substations that supply customers with local power lines.

New Orleans has eight of those eight high-voltage transmission lines; Entergy said Tuesday he was still working to understand the failures of each of them. In parallel, the company is working to repair its power plants; Ideally, they are ready to produce power when they are able to supply the transmission systems. Entergy says local generators are exploring the possibility of powering live power lines directly, without the need for a fully operational transmission system.

Outside of New Orleans, a tall transmission tower on Sunday night, also known as a grid tower, collapsed as a result of Ida’s strong winds. The tower remained standing during Hurricane Katrina when the power line and its conductor were thrown into the Mississippi River when it collapsed. The crew will have to rebuild the tower and replace all the equipment, a time-consuming construction process. Depending on the state of other transmission lines, the project can become a choke or simply a parallel effort.

“The damage caused by Hurricane Ida has eliminated much of the redundancy generated by the transmission system, which makes it difficult to supply energy to customers in the region,” Entergy said. statement on Tuesday.



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