JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — Jefferson Parish should see an “exponential increase” in power restorations on Friday, according to Entergy.
Entergy spokesperson Patrick Hamby said that Entergy laid the foundation to restore power to the parish today by assessing the damage caused by Hurricane Zeta.
“We expect to wrap up the damage assessment tomorrow,” Hamby said. “We are simultaneously restoring power as well.”
As of 7 p.m., power had been restored to 20,000 Entergy customers in Jefferson Parish out of the more than 180,000 that lost power Wednesday night as Hurricane Zeta hit.
All the surrounding parishes have similar outages, with more than 500,000 people without power across Louisiana at the outage’s peak, according to Hamby.
"We laid the foundation today, we’re looking forward to an exponential increase in customer restorations tomorrow," he said.
Entergy CEO David Ellis said earlier in the day that they hoped the majority of customers would have power back at least sometime over the weekend.
"Our objective is to get the majority of power back through the weekend," he said on the Eyewitness Morning News. "We're making a lot of good progress and with daylight we'll be able to knock out a lot of the power outages."
Entergy brought in crews from 12 states to repair damage in the Southeastern Louisiana area, but most are unable to begin working until damage assessments are finished. Officials say Thursday was the biggest day for those assessments and the bulk of repair work will start Friday.
Most of the damage the utility company's scouts are reporting is in the form of downed trees and branches damaging equipment.
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