Irish Channel businesses impacted by several power outages

Residents and business owners in the Irish Channel neighborhood are frustrated after they say they have been impacted by several power outages this Summer.

On Thursday, around 2100 Entergy customers lost power. The last of the outages were restored Friday morning but Entergy is still investigating the cause.

For Irish Channel resident Jessie Booten, this is nothing new.

“We have lost power five times this summer. It typically happens in the morning, yesterday it happened at like 9:54 right before I was supposed to see a client,” she said.

Booten works from home as a telehealth therapist, and no power means no WiFi.

“It means I lose income when I lose power. I can’t conduct my visits, I have to reschedule clients so they’re not getting the care that they need and I can’t confidently reschedule them because I don’t know when the power is coming back,” she said.

Entergy sent WDSU a statement following the outage Thursday:

“Entergy New Orleans crews worked as quickly and safely as possible to restore power to customers impacted by yesterday’s unplanned outage in the Irish Channel. We regret the inconvenience to our customers, and we continue to investigate the cause to prevent future incidents.”

F-45, a gym down the street from Booten’s house has also been impacted by the series of outages.

“First one involved the scheduled power outage that was in the neighborhood, so kind of no big deal there, it was expected. Then a day or so after that, we had a transformer blow across the street, so we had to close down for that. This is now two days we’ve had to close, and we had a storm roll through, had to close down for that. And then recently we had another random power outage where we had to cancel a couple classes,” co-owner Zack Dibenedetto said.

In addition to losing business and inconveniencing clients, F-45 owners said they are also worried about impacts to expensive equipment.

“We run on technology a lot, whether it’s just WiFi for the TVs, the movements are on the TV, the AC itself, and we’re worried about a lot of times when the power gets kicked back on if it’s going to ruin the electronical equipment that we have,” Dibenedetto said.

Entergy canceled planned outages that were supposed to take place this week due to the extreme heat.