Three years after being punished by Hurricane Katrina, utilities along the Gulf of Mexico were buffeted by 110 mph plus winds from Gustav with customer outages topping 500,000 and growing.
Nearly all of the outages were in Louisiana with smaller numbers of customers losing power in the states east of Louisiana. The storm was expected to push west toward Texas, where the wind was beginning to accelerate.
"It's not as strong as originally projected and that's good news," said Mike Burns, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. "But we are experiencing extremely significant damage in areas."
Burns said about 500,000 of Entergy's 1.2 million customers in Louisiana have lost power, and the number continues to grow.
Cleco Corp., which has 273,000 customers in the state, said the number of customers without power was at 50,000 and growing.
Burns said 9,000 Entergy personnel, contractors and hardhats from other utilities were waiting for the storm to clear to begin the task of assessing damage and beginning repairs.
Further east, Mississippi Power reported about 8,000 customers were without power and other Southern Co. utilities in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle reported outages totaling about 8,000.
"I think rebuilding and strengthening our distribution and transmission system over the past two seasons since Katrina hopefully has aided in minimizing the impact of Gustav," Mississippi Power spokeswoman Cindy Duvall said in an e-mail.
In April, Louisiana regulators approved a $1 billion plan from two units of Entergy to cover hurricane repair costs from Katrina and Rita in 2005 and set up a storm reserve fund. Entergy has received permission to pass along the costs to customers.
One of Entergy's utilities, Entergy New Orleans filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in October 2005. The company emerged 20 months later with a plan that paid off all creditors. The utility also received $200 million in federal funding for part of its storm recovery costs.
