quote:
I’d love to see behind the curtain to understand how their automated notification system actually works.

It seems to work reasonably well during isolated outages, which makes sense. But I don’t think it’s reasonably practical/possible to give accurate estimates on power restoration times for specific addresses after a widespread weather event

I think they switched to a default time and notification last night.

I say that, because I have lost power recently, and got the text notifications. When I got home from work around 8:30, I looked at my texts, found the Entergy one, and started sending "stat" back to it. That gives you the most current estimated response. I always used to get a time, but last night I just got "Entergy aware of the outage".

Around 9:30 or so, after checking a few times, I got the response "Entergy is upgrading our system, try back soon". I got that a couple times, and then I got the 5/16 @ 5pm response everyone got. So I think they just shut the regular system down and put that one up as a default.

I spoke to one of the guys who got ours back up, he was parked in a truck at at street corner. He said he came up from New Orleans, had been with Entergy in Nola since Katrina. He said they had to shut more down due to the damage, isolate the bad spots and then they could restore the rest. I believe him, as last night my son took a drive to check damage in the area. My son said he saw some arcing on power lines by a church, like in the movies... I told the guy that, and he said yeah, there were several broken switches (or whatever) and the wires were still hot, they had to shut them down. He said those guys ain't getting power back for a few days, but they were able to isolate them and the rest were good.

Here's a stock photo, my son said it was like this, but said it was red