Tommy Sullivan with Entergy Corporation is the longest serving and oldest employee with the company across Mississippi and possibly the entire service area, according to Candace Coleman, senior communication specialist.
Sullivan was already a seasoned lineman when Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. And as the saying goes, the storm was “not his first rodeo.” Sullivan remembers a catastrophic ice storm during 1994 in north Mississippi that was just as bad, maybe worse on Entergy’s power lines. “It was probably worse to be truthful. Turned off 82 going up 49 going into Greenville, every pole was broken for 30 miles.” Sullivan was gone for three weeks.
But he also believes Katrina was worse on the overall whole of the Entergy system as it went from Grand Isle, La., straight up through Mississippi. According to Sullivan, “Katrina was the worst it’s ever been here in Magee. Everybody talks about New Orleans, but the eye of it was actually in Waveland, Miss. That was the worst of it. It came here and went between here and Meridian. That was the eye of it. New Orleans got destroyed by mostly flooding. The levees broke. They had damage too. The wind damage was worst.”
Katrina was churning in the Mississippi Gulf on Monday, August 29, 2005, and the Entergy crew came in to the office like normal. “Pretty quick in the process that morning, we lost the hospital circuit in Magee. That’s our most important circuit we try to get on first – the hospitals and nursing homes. Between the Magee substation and the hospital it went out. Everybody we had here, which was only six people, we started on the hospital circuit. By the time we’d get something fixed another limb would fall; get that fixed another would fall somewhere else between the substation and the hospital. It’s not but two miles! We couldn’t keep it on.”
Sullivan continued, “We expected it but I don’t think we realized just how bad it was that Magee was getting the worst of it for the state of Mississippi. McComb, Brookhaven and Monticello got some pretty bad; we got the worst of it.”
He shared a story on a personal level from the events of the day. Sullivan’s wife, Stephanie worked at Magee General but had the day off. However, she was called in and told to bring clothes— that it could be a few days. The couple has four children, who at the time were ages 18, 17, 15 and 14. Plans were to take the kids to their grandfather’s home for safety reasons. They balked and Sullivan relented. His oldest daughter went to a friend’s house.
At about 10 a.m. the wind got above 35 miles an hour, which is the threshold for bucket trucks to be in service, and the crew returned to the office. Two hours later Sullivan’s 17-year-old daughter called and said ‘We’re scared to death! The trees are falling here. We want to go to Grandpa’s.” As would any good dad he headed to the door but stopped; he could not take the bucket truck due to the high winds. He convinced a former supervisor to allow him use of his truck to get his children and take them to safety.
Sullivan picked up Stephanie and together they got to Mize without too much trouble, he said. A few trees were down but not blocking the roads. But it was a different story returning to Magee, and Sullivan had no chain saw since he was not in his own truck. Instead, he took a little dirt road that circled back to Dry Creek and Raleigh Road. “It was not easy and it probably took us an hour to get from Mize to Magee, but we got back to Magee.”
Tuesday the crew began working on getting the power back up in thehospitals in Magee, Mendenhall and Raleigh. Damage assessment began as did road clearing too of debris and downed trees. Entergy sent 10 to 15 more supervisors to Magee who knew the area to help in the field.
“By about the third day there were 150 linemen from a company called L.E. Myers out of Illinois and Canada. The funniest part about that was some of those crews were French speaking Canadians and did not speak English. They’d have one on every crew that could speak English. I never realized there were parts of Canada that still speak French,” explained Sullivan.
He went on, “I think the total number in Magee of us trying to supervise was 150 linemen and 150 tree trimmers. Just in the Magee office. But every line we had was torn down. On top of that all your cell towers were down; all your land lines were out. Our radios in our trucks would not work.”
It took 18 days to get everybody on in Magee that could take electricity. There was a lot of damage to houses and meter bases so electricity could not be restored to those buildings until electricians made repairs and some structures were months without because not enough meter bases were available to purchase.
Once power was restored to Simpson County, Entergy left a skeleton crew in place and sent the rest of the linemen to Baton Rouge, La., to complete the same tasks. They were there two weeks and then moved on to New Orleans.
Restoration in NOLA was on a different level. Sullivan recalls it being “unreal.” He said, “They had evacuated everybody. There were x’s on houses of how many people they found in every house (representing the living and dead found). We’re in there trying to pick the power lines up. They’ve got security for us, I mean real security; that was a little scary and unnerving to me. You couldn’t leave your security. If there were four bucket trucks going down the road there was one man in front of us and one man behind us. He’s got an AR 15 and is in a flak jacket. It was bad down there. Where we were we never saw nobody; nobody. It was a ghost town.” They were in the NOLA ward primarily picking up power lines. Transmission lines and substations were not hot. The men remained in NOLA for three weeks.
Entergy operates in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. Coleman provided storm data from Katrina. There were 1.1M power outages; 10,200 restoration workers in the field; and 3,500 support staff.
Sullivan commented on the lessons learned. Poles have improved in that they are bigger and larger in circumference along with heavier construction. In addition, Entergy is using a government standard pole that will withstand 150 mile an hour winds. He said, “It will take them years to get them all implemented because the old stuff is still here.” Magee now has commercial size generators as well.
Entergy also purchased a large number of satellite phones following Katrina. “If it goes into what we call a totally black area where telephones, cell towers – if you lose everything like you did in Katrina. They probably have hundreds and hundreds of satellite phones now. They probably only had 25 in the state then.”
