DEMCO: Restoring power will be a ‘weeks long process’ following Hurricane Ida

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Officials with the energy provider DEMCO say restoring power to its members affected by Hurricane Ida will be “a weeks long process” and is advising members to “make plans now for their health, safety and comfort.”

“Though we would love nothing more than to restore power to all members at this time, without repairs to transmission and transformer poles, that isn’t possible. Also until damaged infrastructure is repaired, we cannot begin to replace distribution poles and lines and estimated times of restoration are not possible,” DEMCO said in a Facebook post Tuesday, Aug. 31.

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The energy provider says crews are beginning the work to replace and repair damaged electrical infrastructure that is in their means to do so.

“We will not know nor can we plan for any of these since as-they-go fixes,” the provider said.

An outage map on DEMCO’s website was offline as of Tuesday afternoon.

The webpage had the following message:

“The outage map is currently offline and updating to reflect all outages and current restoration status. Long duration outages are widespread for an estimated 60,000-80,000.”