Fully restoring power to virtually all of New Orleans and much of its surrounding suburbs could take days, or even weeks, after Hurricane Ida knocked all eight electric transmission lines feeding the city out of service, the utility company Entergy said. It warned that it could take several days just to assess the damage.
A transmission-line tower on the border of Avondale and Bridge City, across the Mississippi River from Harahan, La., and just upstream from New Orleans, collapsed Sunday in the ferocious winds.
As powerful as the storm was, the damage it wreaked on Louisiana’s power grid was yet one more example of the weaknesses of the country’s electricity systems. Coming on the heels of extensive blackouts in Texas last winter and in California last summer, Sunday’s failures demonstrated a lack of resilience and backup capacity in the nation’s grid.
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