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.  The storm system exited our service territory early afternoon.  As of 6:00 p.m., power has been restored to over 50% of the customers who lost power as a result of the storm and 25,000 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.  Crews have made significant progress assessing damage across the state, which will continue into tomorrow morning in the most heavily impacted areas. We continue to monitor the weather as the forecast calls for thunderstorms Saturday and Sunday across the entire state. We are responding with crews and resources to restore outages as quickly and safely as possible; however, given the severity of the storm and the potential for additional thunderstorms over the next two days, some outages could take longer to restore.

Entergy Texas continues to make great progress and is working in Beaumont, Port Arthur, Nederland, Pt. Neches, Groves, Orange, West Orange, Pinehurst, Pine Forest, Vidor, Rose City, Silsbee, Lumberton, Kountze, Village Mills and Warren that were impacted by Hurricane Laura.

A message from Stuart Barrett, vice president of customer service:

Customers asked to conserve electricity.