In the afternoon Wednesday (October 28) Hurricane Zeta made landfall, striking the Gulf Coast first.
Hurricane Zeta is the 25th named storm of 2020 and the eighth hurricane, lengthening a record active season for storms.
Tallies of the damage left by Zeta indicate 469,000 people across the state of Louisiana are without power, as reported by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.
Entergy, an electric provider for Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, reported 174,000 outages in Jefferson Parish and another 115,000 in Orleans Parish. Entergy’s CEO, David Ellis told 4WWLTV he hoped most customers would have their power restored sometime over the weekend.
“We’re making good progress,” he said, “and with daylight we’ll be able to knock out a lot of the power outages.”
Lee Sabatini, a spokesperson for Entergy, said that trucks designed to go out into the damage to begin working on restoring power can’t go out until winds go below 30 miles per hour. Sabatini did state that quicker ways of rerouting power from field offices has begun telling reporters, “We prepared for a significant amount of outages and that’s what we got.”
Other states outside of the Gulf, including Georgia are also reporting power outages. WSB-TV Atlanta reported 1 million people lost power some point during the early hours of Thursday (October 29), just as Zeta made its way across the state.
According to the National Hurricane Center, there currently is a disturbance in the Caribbean Sea that has a 20% chance of developing into a tropical depression over the next couple of days.
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