When exactly did the city of New Orleans lose power during Hurricane Katrina?

November 7, 2008 5:14 PM

I'm trying to find out the date and time that the city of New Orleans lost power during Hurricane Katrina. A customer service representative at Entergy told me that it was staggered throughout the morning of August 29th, the day the storm hit Louisiana, but I would really love more specific information. After searching news archives and situation reports, all I've found so far is that the Superdome lost power at 5am that same morning. Where can I find the time and date?
posted by easy_being_green to Grab Bag (2 answers total)

Best answer: In my old job I would look at electricity utility load data. This is Entergy's FERC Form 714 hourly load data for 2005. It rolls up all of Entergy (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi).

I would look at the data for 8/24/2005 through 9/1/2005 compared to what you would expect those values to be. Just use an average of the values that occurred 168 hours ago and 336 ago (exactly 1 and 2 weeks prior - so Sunday at 3am gets compared to Sunday at 3am). This is what I see:
-From 8/24/2005 to 8/27/2005 at 7am, power usage is between 100% and 104% of the expected value.
-at 8am on 8/27/2005 the power usage is 100%
-at 9am the value is 97% of expected. It continues to fall throughout the day. By midnight it is 90%. This would suggest Gulf Coast residents began evacuating their homes.
-It remains at about 90% overnight and into following day, up until 8am or 9am, when it begins falling again. 88% down to 85% or 84% by midnight. Some more evacuations.
-On 8/29/2005 it dropped from 84% at 4am to 55% by 2pm. It bottoms out at 4pm or so. This is where I would put the outages.
posted by milkrate at 10:44 PM on November 7, 2008

It's likely that the Entergy rep was right on. Unless all the major transmission lines drop out of commission simultaneously, widespread power outages are fairly localized and staggered events. Most of the outages are caused by trees falling and downing power lines, so different parts of the city will lose power at different times.

As an example, when Hurricane Ike hit Houston, something 90% of Houston lost power, but some lost it at 11pm, some made it to 2 or 3 am, and a few lucky ones never lost it at all.

If there's a specific part of NOLA that you're interested in, it might be easier to answer.
posted by chrisamiller at 1:03 PM on November 8, 2008