re: Tropical force winds in BR (July 31)

I’ve heard that, prayers

Crazy that I didn't get a drop at Tiger Bend/Antioch

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55 mph wind gusts at BTR airport this afternoon. (ASOS)

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The station in the Inniswold area either just missed the worst winds, or failed to measure them. An 18mph gust was its max.

Oof

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the culprit is a pine limb that fell by the Arboretum. Broke the lines off a pole but didn’t break them luckily. So they’ll have to evaluate the lines and see if they have to set a new pole.

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That damn feeder line is such a weak link. Damnit Entergy just bury the lines!

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That damn feeder line is such a weak link. Damnit Entergy just bury the lines!

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Agreed. I don't think Entergy has enough financial incentive to embark on that for the neighborhood. They did a decent job a couple years back cutting back a bunch of tree limbs away from the overhead lines but there's only so much you can do with this many trees around. The same with those brand new poles on Highland - they are solid and should last a while but are surrounded by tall old trees.

The last outage we had was May 8th according to my Mobile Link app (Generac). That was a 6 hour outage from a limb sitting on one of the three phases of 34.5kV utility power on Highland. If the outage is caused by a power line inside the neighborhood, you can guarantee it'll take at least a day or two for them to even come out and look at it. If it's on Highland and affecting more than just this neighborhood, they are much quicker to come out. But everyone in here knows the deal - probably 30-40% of houses on that old overhead circuit have some form of backup power. Today is my first overnight outage since purchasing my generator back in the fall of 2021.

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So 55 mph winds causes 10,000 outages for 30 plus hours? What a shitshow. Without FEMA money to squander and out-of-state contractors getting OT, we get to see what a shoddy network and service system we get with Entergy.

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We had a similar situation up my way in north AL a few weeks ago. It was a severe warned storm diving from the NW to SE. It was warned for the generic 60+ mph winds when it passed my house and got bumped to 70+ a little down the line.

Like today's storm in BR, when all was said and done there were no severe winds (60+) measured, but there was considerable tree damage and fairly widespread power outages.

Looking at the damage and some video, I'm convinced there had to be a swath of considerably higher winds with that storm. There were none measured, though, even where there were stations that should have been near enough to the worst of it to record it.

Another possibility is that the direction those storms were moving played a part. The N/S nature of it stressed trees in a way they hadn't faced in quite a while, and shook loose limbs and weaker trees that couldn't hold up. Just a theory.

Our storm wasn't a microburst, and I don't think today's BR storm was a microburst (just from how it looked on radar). I believe weather stations have just missed the max winds.

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saw 2 WBRZ trucks on north oak hills about 20 mins ago.

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They were there around 730 too

And Entergy’s maps and text messages are another shitshow. Automated crap that’s not accurate, not timely, and leads to an endless loop of error filled updates and repeated notifications from customers trying to correct Entergy’s mistakes.