More Than 1.2 Million Still Without Power as Zeta Cleanup Begins

 Jan Wesner Childs

Published: October 30, 2020

Residents across the South spent Friday assessing damage and beginning the cleanup process after Hurricane Zeta ripped roofs off buildings, knocked down trees that crushed cars and homes and left at least six people dead and millions without power.

"The biggest impact from this storm was wind, and so there is damage to homes and to businesses and other structures, but the biggest damage has been to the electricity infrastructure across Southeast Louisiana," Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news briefing Friday afternoon.

Edwards said 18 hospitals and about the same number of nursing homes were running on generator power.

(MORE: Hurricane Zeta Recap)

Zeta made landfall in Southeast Louisiana Wednesday as a strong Category 2 hurricane packing wind gusts up to 112 mph. The storm barreled across New Orleans and into Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.

More than 1.2 million homes and businesses were still without power across those states Friday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us. That included more than half of the utility customers in Orleans Parish, where New Orleans is located, and more than 70% of those in adjacent Jefferson Parish, where parish president Cynthia Lee Sheng estimated as many as 400 trees blocked roadways after the storm.

“You will see throughout the parish there are trees that were broken right in half, there are trees that were completely uprooted, there are many places where trees are on our roadways," Lee Sheng told weather.com in a phone call Friday afternoon. “Very messy outside with a lot of tree limbs down, but our citizens are out there cleaning up their property today.”

She said residents were being asked to limit flushing toilets, doing laundry and taking showers due to the stress power outages put on the wastewater system.

The town of Grand Isle in Jefferson Parish saw some of the worst damage. Some homes there were missing roofs and the town's levee was breached in three different spots.

Dodie Vegas, who with her husband owns Bridge Side Marina on Grand Isle, said damage was minimal at their waterside complex of cabins, campgrounds and docking facilities, but the rest of the island wasn’t so lucky.

“As far as you can see, going down the island, the power lines are cracked in half,” Vegas told the Associated Press. “The middle of the island looks like a bomb was dropped.”

(MORE: Hurricane Zeta Power Outages Complicate Voting in The South)

In all, more than 339,000 outages were still being reported Friday afternoon in Louisiana. The other remaining widespread outages included more than 272,000 in Georgia; 245,000 in Alabama; 163,000 in Mississippi; and 145,000 in North Carolina.

Entergy New Orleans chief executive David Ellis said most of the outages there should be restored over the weekend, according to nola.com. More than 1,100 poles and nearly 200 transformers were damaged.

Edwards said repairs were complicated by the outages in the other states hit by Zeta, as well as hundreds of thousands of ongoing outages in Oklahoma and Texas due to Winter Storm Billy.

At least six people died during Zeta's wrath. In Louisiana, a 55-year-old New Orleans man was electrocuted by low-hanging power lines. In Mississippi, a man taking video of the storm in Biloxi drowned at a marina, the Sun Herald reported. In Georgia, three people died after trees fell on their homes. One person also died in Alabama when a tree fell on a home, the AP reported.

The storm was the fifth to make landfall in Louisiana this year. About 3,000 people displaced by Hurricane Laura in August are still being sheltered in hotels, Edwards said. Another 100 or so were still evacuated due to Hurricane Delta earlier this month. About two dozen were in a local shelter after Zeta.

Some areas hit hard by previous storms have been without power for more than two months. On top of that, the state is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our heart breaks because this has been a tough, tough year,” Edwards said.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.