NEW ORLEANS, La. (WGNO) The New Orleans City Council tasked Entergy Tuesday to explain their mitigation efforts following two animal-related outages.
In the month of March, Entergy had three major outages. One was caused by the EF-3 tornado. One of them was caused by a bird extending its wings at the Derbigny station March 9 and a squirrel caused another two days later.
“The key to our animal mitigation strategies is finding that balance between what’s economically sound to deploy and how does that measure up from an effectiveness perspective,” an Entergy official said during Tuesday’s Utility Committee meeting.
The company’s plan included noise machines to scare off the birds and barrier walls to keep them, drones and vandals out. However, the city claimed those efforts are not enough.
“We were getting calls from people stuck at the top of buildings trying to make their way down,” Councilwoman-at-large Helena Moreno said.
Homeowners also thought it was time for a change.
Sylvia McKenzie lived in New Orleans East and told WGNO News, since Hurricane Katrina, she started buying battery operated products due to a lack of trust and faith in Entergy.
“This last storm we had, we rolled just to [see] how many areas surrounding us were without power,” McKenzie said. “Do you know that little box was the only area without power? All of it was on but that box was off. It hurts to be from New Orleans and we stand here getting screwed.”