Louisianians going home; lights back on in Arkansas

The Associated Press

The flow of Louisiana residents back home Saturday continued by plane, bus and car as power was restored to thousands of Arkansans who were left in the dark after last week’s Gulf Coast hurricane became an inland storm.

By mid-day, Entergy Arkansas crews had restored service to all but 8,520 of their customers, and company spokesman David Lewis said he expected everyone would be back on line by Sunday.

At the peak of the outages, some 95,000 customers of Entergy Arkansas, the state’s largest electric company, were without power. Another 40,000 served by electric cooperatives also lost electricity last week, but the co-ops said power would be restored within that day.

“We’ve got a lot of people working on this and they’re just going job to job, taking care of every broken pole, every severed power line,” Lewis said, adding that the company had about 1,600 workers repairing the damage and restoring service Saturday.

The downfall that began Tuesday dropped as much as a foot of rain in places before leaving the state Thursday. Wind gusts reached up to 40 mph. Rivers ran over their banks, and crops were flooded.

The National Weather Service said Saturday many rivers remained above flood stage: Petit Jean River at Danville, Fourche la Fave at Houston, the Cache River at Patterson, the White River at Augusta and Clarenden, the Ouachita River at Camden and Thatcher Lock and Dam, and the Saline River at Rye. It was raining in northern and northwest Arkansas and more rain was in the forecast for that region.

The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management was assessing storm damage, said spokesman Tommy Jackson. No estimates were available Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, emergency officials expected all of the more than 5,000 evacuees who sought shelter at Fort Chaffee or in the dozens of emergency shelters that opened for them would be gone by Sunday, he said.

Of the 2,300 at the old army post in west Arkansas, more than 800 left Friday night on 16 government-contracted buses, according to Capt. Chris Heathscott of the Arkansas National Guard.

Eight flights were scheduled throughout the day Saturday from Fort Smith, accommodating nearly 1,000 Louisiana residents, and buses would take a few hundred more during the day, Heathscott said. About 300 evacuees would remain overnight at the post and leave Sunday, most likely by plane, Heathscott said.

Jackson said there were some delays with the first flights out, but operations were going smoothly otherwise. He said there was “some sort of mix up” with luggage left behind and it would have to be sent to its owners later.

The ADEM Web site reported only 96 evacuees remained in shelters Saturday afternoon.

Lewis, of Entergy Arkansas, said the remaining outages by mid-day Saturday amounted to nearly 4,000 in Hot Springs, 2,100 in the Warren-Crossett-Monticello area, 1,000 in Little Rock, and about 300 in the Malvern-Arkadelphia area.

For more information see Sunday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.