Most of Tri-City area power restored by Tuesday

Wind from Tropical Storm Barry was the major issue for the Tri-City area and knocked down a lot of utility poles, power lines and trees, causing many customers to lose power.

Over 90 percent of Morgan City had power restored by Tuesday morning, and most of the rest of the Tri-City area also had power.

The National Weather Service received a report of a 63 mph wind gust Saturday afternoon in Berwick, meteorologist Rob Megnia said.

Forecasters had warned the storm could be a major rain event, but the wind ended up causing the majority of problems in St. Mary Parish. There wasn’t much major damage to structures in Morgan City, Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi said.

“Just trees and power, that’s what we’re dealing with,” Grizzaffi said.

Most of Morgan City was without power Saturday morning, and by Sunday night officials had restored power to about half of the city, Grizzaffi said. Morgan City officials started cleanup efforts Sunday and continued to clean up debris Tuesday, he said.

Officials hoped to restore power to 100% of customers in Morgan City soon, but didn’t have a timeline for when all power may be restored, Grizzaffi said. The city hired seven contractor crews to assist city workers with restoring power, the mayor said. Those crews worked until 11 p.m. Monday, and started again at 6 a.m. Tuesday.

As of shortly after 7 a.m. Tuesday, workers had restored power to over 90% of customers in Morgan City, Grizzaffi said. This morning, officials were working to restore electricity to homes in Lakeside Subdivision and then were going to tackle a list of isolated issues, the mayor said.

Morgan City is the only municipality in the Tri-City area that runs its own power system. Berwick, Patterson and Bayou Vista get their power from Cleco.

As of 9 a.m. Tuesday, Cleco had restored power to over 58,000 of the 63,000 Cleco customers who lost power following Tropical Storm Barry, a news release said. Of those customers still without power, 2,534 were in St. Mary Parish.

“Our crews have restored power to over 92 percent of customers impacted by Barry, and they are still working hard to get the lights on for the remaining customers,” said James Lass, general manager of distribution operations and emergency management, in the release.

The company planned to restore power Tuesday to most customers, but expects there will be some scattered outages overnight.

“At this point in our restoration process, the work we are performing to repair damage is restoring a smaller number of customers, resulting in a slower restoration time,” Lass said. "We want our customers without power to know, we are still working just as hard to repair their outage and restoring their power is very important to us.”

Cleco reported on its Facebook page Sunday morning 16,764 customers were without power in St. Mary Parish.

Despite wind causing most of the issues for the area, the area still got an average of 6 to 8 inches of rain from Friday through Tuesday morning with a small portion of Vermilion Bay getting 8 to 10 inches, Megnia said.