LITTLE ROCK, AR --
Entergy Arkansas President Hugh McDonald said crews have restored power to about forty percent of its customers, but there's still a lot of work to do.He blamed a weather trifecta -- ice, snow, and wind -- for the outages.
"Clearly, we'd like to be further along. We expect to finish our most damaged areas within that seven day period where we estimated," McDonald said.
Even with nearly five thousand workers in the area repairing those lines, it could be next year before many Little Rock residents have lights. The situation isn't so bad in Cabot, Benton, and Bryant so those customers will have power much earlier than the folks in Little Rock.
"That doesn't mean we're not doing Little Rock, but we're doing work everywhere, and we're trying to prioritize and prorate workers in our force to get people on as quickly as possible," McDonald said.
McDonald said they had an emergency plan, but their weather models called for them to focus on northeast Arkansas.
"I would like to have had more people here quicker, but given the facts that we knew at the time, we thought we had plenty of resources available," McDonald said.
Entergy has modified the way customers can see outages and view their progress. Click here to see it.
