Data & history
South Louisiana power outage history
Few regions in the country lose power as often, or for as long, as South Louisiana. Here's the recent record of the storms and floods that have taken the grid down across our parishes, and why standby generators are so common in hurricane country.
1M+
Entergy customers lost power after Hurricane Ida (2021)
All 8
transmission lines into New Orleans failed at once during Ida
~1.4M
statewide outages after Hurricane Gustav (2008)
Weeks to a month
to restore the hardest-hit bayou parishes after Ida
| Year | Event | Impact on the grid |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Hurricane Francine | Came ashore near Terrebonne Parish; knocked out power to hundreds of thousands across South Louisiana. |
| 2021 | Hurricane Ida | All eight transmission lines into New Orleans failed at once and a tower collapsed into the Mississippi River. 1M+ Entergy customers lost power; the hardest-hit bayou parishes (Terrebonne, Lafourche) waited weeks to a month. |
| 2020 | Hurricane Zeta (Oct) | Crossed the metro and Northshore as a fast Category 2, roughly half a million customers out for days. |
| 2020 | Hurricane Delta (Oct) | Struck Southwest Louisiana on nearly the same path as Laura just six weeks later, knocking out power across a region still under blue tarps. |
| 2020 | Hurricane Laura (Aug) | Category 4 landfall near Lake Charles; 600,000+ customers out statewide and weeks-long restoration across Calcasieu Parish. |
| 2016 | The Great Flood (Aug) | A 1-in-1,000-year rain event flooded ~53,000 East Baton Rouge homes and cut power across the capital region and Acadiana. |
| 2012 | Hurricane Isaac | A slow, soaking storm that left roughly 900,000 customers across southeast Louisiana without power for days. |
| 2008 | Hurricane Gustav | The worst utility damage in Baton Rouge history, about half the city dark for over a week; ~1.4M Entergy customers out statewide. |
| 2005 | Hurricane Katrina | Catastrophic. Much of southeast Louisiana was dark for weeks as flooding destroyed substations and the distribution grid. |
Figures compiled from Entergy restoration reports and press releases, NOAA/National Hurricane Center summaries, and local reporting (The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com, The Advocate, Louisiana Illuminator). Outage counts are peak or regional approximations; the takeaway is the pattern: long, repeated, multi-parish outages. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite this page with attribution; email us for the underlying storm-by-storm figures.
Why South Louisiana over-indexes on backup power
Few places in the country lose power as often, or for as long, as South Louisiana, and it isn't only the hurricanes. The same low, wet geography that draws the storms also sits at the fragile end of a long transmission network: when Ida hit in 2021, all eight high-voltage lines feeding New Orleans failed at once and a tower toppled into the Mississippi, blacking out the whole metro on a clear-sky afternoon after the winds had passed.
Add the summer thunderstorms, the flooding, and the sheer frequency (Katrina, Gustav, Isaac, Laura, Delta, Zeta, Ida, Francine, all inside two decades), and standby generators here have gone from a luxury to standard equipment. A permanently installed unit starts automatically, runs on natural gas or propane, and keeps a home livable through the days-to-weeks restorations these parishes have come to expect.
The pattern is why we exist: do you need a standby generator? See the South Louisiana hub or your city page for local detail.
Don’t ride out the next one in the dark
Get a free, no-pressure quote from a vetted installer across South Louisiana, or call now to talk it through.