Hammond isn’t a coastal town — and that changes the whole conversation about backup power.
Sitting inland on the I-12 corridor, roughly
45 miles from both Baton Rouge and New Orleans and home to Southeastern Louisiana University,
Hammond is far enough from the Gulf that storm surge is rarely the problem. The problem is what
the wind does to the trees.
Tangipahoa Parish is pine-and-oak country, and a hurricane this far inland still arrives with
tropical-storm to hurricane-force gusts. Those gusts snap pines and drop limbs across the
overhead lines that feed the parish — which is exactly why an inland town can sit in the dark
for as long as a coastal one. Entergy Louisiana
serves most of the Hammond area, with electric co-op territory in some of the rural reaches of
the parish, and either way the failure point is the same: limbs on the wires.
Water is the second half of the story, and again it’s not surge — it’s rain and river. The
Tangipahoa River and the parish’s flat,
low-lying ground have produced some of Louisiana’s worst inland flooding, including the historic
2016 rain events. When a storm parks over the parish, the threat is rising water from above and
from the river, not a wall of seawater.
A permanently installed standby generator answers both. It detects the outage and restores power
automatically — usually within seconds — and runs for as long as the grid is down, whether that’s
a single stormy night or two weeks of wind cleanup.
See how installation works →