SWEPCO Louisiana outages almost fully restored after rough weather week (2024)

A break in the weather during a week of rain has allowed the Ark-La-Tex's electricity provider to catch up on repairing the many outages repeated thunderstorms since Sunday brought to its grid.

After a week of rough weather battered the SWEPCO grid between Sunday and Wednesday, the utility at 8 a.m. Friday reported fewer than 200 of their Louisiana customers were without power. Thousands earlier in the week had lost power in the storms, and each new round of wind and rain undid at least some of the restoration work SWEPCO linemen had achieved while the conditions that weather left behind limited access to damaged infrastructure.

"A welcome break in the weather allowed crews to make more progress," SWEPCO said in a Thursday afternoon news release. "Latest damage estimates show many miles of damaged wire due to the relentless storms. Additionally, flooding brings extra challenges and complexities. The work is often slow and deliberate because of the extensive flooding and hard-to-reach, sometimes treacherous terrain. Several crews have deployed boats in severely flooded work areas."

The storms plaguing the Ark-La-Tex between Sunday and Wednesday were part of a mesoscale convective system, which meteorologists describe as an organized band of thunderstorms. They first blew into the Shreveport-Bossier region between 9-10 p.m. Sunday and quickly began to cause outages. SWEPCO's outage map around 8 a.m. Monday reported more than 11,500 Louisiana customers had lost power including more than 2,300 in Caddo Parish, more than 1,100 in Bossier Parish and more than 4,700 in DeSoto Parish.

SWEPCO at the time of Sunday's storms was just nearing completion of extensive restoration work in Arkansas after storms and tornadoes over Memorial Day weekend. The fresh round of thunderstorms was the first setback of the week.

Storms later on Monday and again on Tuesday added new outages throughout the Ark-La-Tex.

The peak outage count for the SWEPCO grid this week was about 41,000 Tuesday afternoon, the utility reported. By Wednesday morning, it was about 31,000. In Caddo, there were about 6,500 outages Wednesday morning and about 3,600 Tuesday morning.

"We continue to leverage resources on the ground, in the air and on boats to make our way to where work needs to be done. Across our service territory, the dangerous and high floodwaters slowed about a dozen individual repairs. With the sun shining, crews are hopeful the waters will recede to allow for this work to proceed," the news release said.

Though essentially all Louisiana customers had been reconnected by Friday morning, SWEPCO still was anticipating a number of Texas towns, such as Longview and Marshall, would have to wait until Saturday for full restoration.

It's likely there will be more soon, but it will be less severe, according to National Weather Service Shreveport Office Meteorologist Aaron Davis. A cold front is coming.

"We're getting a little break in this heavy pattern that we've been in," Davis said. "We're not anticipating major rainfall. We're not even anticipating severe weather with this cold front."

After a hot and humid weekend, Davis said a cold front will move into the area beginning Sunday night. It will create the kind of conditions favorable to rain and thunderstorms, but won't pack quite the punch of themesoscale convective system.

"That pattern has broken down for us some," Davis said. "A thunderstorm is quite literally an engine. The instability is the gas for the engine where the wind sheer is the air for the engine. The wind sheer is what will help sustain a storm and keep it going and keep it mature. But when it comes to this weekend, we just don't really have the wind sheer that we've seen the last couple of weeks."