Louisiana Power Outages: The Latest on When the Power Will Return

Forecasters with the National Weather Service in Lake Charles told us this was coming. The Storm Prediction Center echoed those sentiments in their forecasts too. So, it was no surprise when Lafayette, St Landry, Beauregard, Calcasieu, Allen, and a host of other parishes were inundated with heavy rains, strong winds, and possible tornadoes as the predicted storm system moved through.

The good news is that this current round of severe storms has now moved away from the area and is rapidly moving eastward out of the state. The bad news is forecasters expect another round of severe storms to cause even more weather woes for the I-10 corridor especially later this afternoon (Friday).

Strong storms were not confined just to Louisiana, as you can see from these social media posts out of Houston, Texas, and the surrounding area that part of the world was struck by strong storms too.

It was that same series of thunderstorms that advanced from southeastern Texas into Louisiana that brought us our severe weather conditions late Thursday and early this Friday morning.

As of 01:00 CDT this morning, Entergy was reporting more than 100,000 customers without electrical service. SLEMCO was showing just over 15,000 without service, and Cleco was reporting just over 30,000 without service. The outages in Lafayette Parish had dropped to just under 2,500 customers without service as of 1 a.m.

If you'd like to see a map of Power Outages Across Louisiana, click this link.

That service is updated on a regular basis and is a good barometer of where the lights are on and where they are out. None of the providers we reached out to in the early hours of Friday were able to offer a timetable for when power service might be restored. We do know that all of the utilities that serve Acadiana, the area around Lafayette, did have crews out in the field assessing damage and repairing problems.

In addition to the link we provided for statewide power issues, we encourage you to visit the website of your power provider. Quite often the information displayed on those sites is more up-to-date and it's possible to reach out via the websites to learn more about the power restoration timetable.