Hurricane Laura entered the Entergy Arkansas service area Thursday morning with heavy rains and tropical storm winds ranging from 40-50 mph and wind gusts up to 65 mph.  Although the initial storm system exited our service territory early Friday afternoon, we’ve experienced isolated thunderstorms Saturday and Sunday causing additional storm damage.  As of 6 p.m., power has been restored to approximately 93% of the customers who lost power as a result of these storms and 3,500 customers remain without power in the heaviest hit areas near El Dorado and Magnolia.  Nearly all customers who can safely take power are expected to be restored by 10 p.m. tonight, with the possibility of some isolated cases carrying into tomorrow morning.

This morning, a nationwide internet outage impacted our ability to update our online View Outages map. We apologize for this inconvenience and expect the map to begin updating later today. UPDATE: The issue has been resolved.

Hurricane Laura entered the Entergy Arkansas service area Thursday morning with heavy rains and tropical storm winds ranging from 40-50 mph and wind gusts up to 65 mph.  Although the initial storm system exited our service territory early Friday afternoon, we’ve experienced isolated thunderstorms Saturday afternoon and late evening causing additional storm damage.  As of 8 a.m., power has been restored to approximately 85% of the customers who lost power as a result of these storms and 7,000 customers remain without power.  The southern part of the state experienced the most significant damage, including downed trees, power lines, damage to high voltage structures and utility poles.  Damage assessments have identified a total of 252 broken poles, 328 damaged pieces of equipment and over 694 spans of downed wire across the state still needing to be repaired.  We will continue to monitor the weather as isolated thunderstorms and high temperatures are forecast to continue throughout today and into Monday across the entire state. Additional crews and resources have been assigned to the heaviest hit areas to restore outages as quickly and safely as possible; however, given the severity of the storm and the potential for additional weather impacts, some outages could take longer to restore.

Damage assessment continues for our customers who lost power due to Hurricane Laura. Significant restoration progress has been made outside of the hardest-hit areas.

Hurricane Laura will go down in the record books as the strongest storm to hit Louisiana since 1856 and has tied for the fifth strongest to make landfall in the continental U.S.