As SWEPCO reports more Louisiana outages, additional thunderstorms expected this week (2024)

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story should have said a potential PSC-instigated study could be funded by ratepayer. The PSC can bill utilities for such studies, the cost of which utilities then are allowed to pass on to ratepayers.

Thousands of Louisiana residents, yet again, are waiting for power to be restored to their homes after a brief-but-heavy thunderstorm Sunday night — and the same kind of weather is in the forecast through much of the coming week.

Nearly 11,500 Louisiana SWEPCO customers were without power around 8 a.m. Monday, more than 30% of whom are residents of Caddo and Bossier parishes, according to the utility's outage map. The outages followed a call last week from Shreveport's public service commissioner to hire a consultant to study SWEPCO's electrical system and reveal why it's suffering such frequent outages, which SWEPCO's president supported while suggesting a study would show a need for expensive upgrades and more tree trimming.

At 8 a.m. Monday, more than 2,300 Caddo customers and more than 1,100 Bossier customers didn't have power, according to the outage map. Outages were highest in DeSoto Parish, where at the same time more than 4,700 customers were without power.

Around 1:30 p.m., about 1,400 Caddo, 100 Bossier and 4,300 DeSoto customers still were without electricity, according to the outage map. SWEPCO estimated the timeframe for full restoration for Bossier City, Vivian and Plain Dealing would be 5 p.m. Monday; 10 p.m. Monday for Stonewall, Natchitoches and Haughton; noon on Tuesday for Shreveport; and 10 p.m. Tuesday for Mansfield.

"SWEPCO’s Ark-La-Tex storm response, which included hundreds of utility professionals deployed to hardest hit areas, was nearly complete late Sunday when yet another round of storms slowed progress and created new outages," the utility said in a news release Monday afternoon.

"Another area of severe thunderstorms has fired up in south-central Kansas and northwestern Oklahoma and is expected to take aim at SWEPCO’s service territory this afternoon through this evening. A line of severe thunderstorms is expected with widespread 60-80 mph wind gusts, which could lead to significant utility problems. Customers are advised to stay weather aware."

National Weather Service Shreveport Office Meteorologist Armani Cassel called Sunday's storm a "mesoscale convective system," meaning it was an organized collection of thunderstorms moving in a line from Oklahoma through the Red River Valley.

The storms hit the Shreveport area around 9 p.m. and lasted for about three hours, Cassel said. Rainfall was heaviest for about one hour of that time and the fastest gust NWS recorded Sunday night was 47 mph, he said.

Such weather patterns are fairly common this time of year through about mid-June, Cassel said. Similar weather was expected to pick up again around 3 p.m. Monday with chances of returning both Wednesday and Thursday, Cassel said.

"We're really just expecting more of that again today," Cassel said Monday morning.

SWEPCO has been battling storms over the last year with enough wind and rain to disrupt their system, sometimes for days at a time.

The storms and the damage they bring are not isolated, affecting Texas and Arkansas SWEPCO customers with about the same frequency. Only a few hours before the storm which knocked out power for so many Louisiana customers Sunday night, SWEPCO posted a news release stating electricity had been restored for 91% of their 19,000 of customers, mostly in Arkansas, who lost power during storms and tornadoes over Memorial Day Weekend. SWEPCO reported the storms caused major damage to its infrastructure.

Nearly a year ago, a powerful storm washed over the Ark-La-Tex and left more than 250,000 customers without power for about a week. The outage crisis, which came in the midst of a heat wave, was deadly, and SWEPCO said its infrastructure was badly damaged.

SWEPCO customers in the time between suffered round after round of outages, some more severe and some less. Almost all those outages were related to storms, but north Louisiana customers have started to lose patience with their sole electricity provider.

SWEPCO President and Chief Operating Officer Brett Mattison, while speaking at Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell's news conference last week, blamed falling trees and bad weather for about 85% of the utility's outages. Welcoming Campbell's call for a ratepayer-funded study of the privately-owned SWEPCO electrical grid's reliability, Mattison said the kind of tree trimming and storm hardening he suspects would improve the situation will be costly— which Mattison implied would require rate hikes to implement.

"I don't understand how you can do more and do it better without spending more money to do that," Mattison said.

Campbell said his phone is "ringing off the hook" with customers unhappy with such frequent interruptions.

Last week he said he'll ask the rest of the Louisiana Public Service Commission this month to hire a consultant who will study SWEPCO's grid, which he predicted could take as much as a year to provide results assuming the regulators approve his request.

While Campbell said he isn't ready yet to authorize the kind of rate hikes that might facilitate an overhaul of the SWEPCO grid, he said the study would help inform such a decision.

"We can give rate increases, but I don't know enough information to give them rate increases," Campbell said. "That's why we have consultants."