I'm a survivor of Hurricane Laura, just a year ago. It hit SOUTHWEST Louisiana as a Category 4, maybe a 5, since we lost a bunch of physical measurement equipment that blew away with the last reading being 150 MPH.
Entergy dove right into restoration with crews driving in from across the country.
We lost our 500kv system - several structures flat on the ground. We lost a multitude of 230kv circuits. We're heavily industrialized here. Structures were down all over the place. We lost the 138kv system and the 69kv system, again multitudes of structures down. An estimation was that 80% of the distribution structures and lines were down. South of me is a little town called Hackberry, Louisiana, about twenty miles from the gulf coast.
I have a station (natural gas pipeline gathering from offshore fields) actually ON the Gulf Coast. I drove through Hackberry. South of Hackberry there was not a single electric power pole standing. No distribution, no transmission at 69kv. My station was on generator for more than five weeks. Those little coastal communities got power back via the electrical co-op's installation of rental generation. One of the substations was on my drive down. Between 150 mph winds and the storm surge, it was GONE. Well, the lattice structure survived. The circuit breakers and regulators disappeared.
We got power back in town after three weeks. Some beat that by a week, but a lot of them waited weeks longer, especially in rural areas.
And God bless those utility crews - sixteen hour days for weeks on end, but they got the job done.
I worked a bit at the SPR Hackberry site and a compressor station over in in Starks, around Lafayette, Abbeville, Morgan City and Houma, Thibodaux and up to Union Carbide in Meterie, but haven't been back there since the 80's. I really liked that area.
These sort of events are wake up calls to the local utilities. In Florida, we had a hurricane come up the middle of the state. 75% of the state was without power. This prompted a boom for various tree surgeon companies. In many ways engineering is built on failures.
