Climate Change and Sustainability Committee.

Diolch yn fawr am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. All right, thank you members. I will go ahead and approve the minutes of March 11th, 2026 climate change meeting. Can I get a motion? Seconded by Council Member Harris. All those in favor? Any opposed? Okay, perfect. My machine isn't working, but we'll just. Okay, perfect. All right, well, while that's being worked out, we'll go ahead and move on to agenda item number three. This is a resolution for the integrated resource plan rulemaking utility docket 2601. The integrated resource plan IRP rulemaking resolution is about modernizing and updating the council's integrated resource plan rules to reflect how the electric system is changing. The council's existing IRP rules were adopted in 2017. However, since then, the types and capabilities of distributed energy resources, or DERs, have evolved significantly, including customer-sided generation, battery storage, demand response, distributed generation, and other technologies capable of supplying or modifying electrical demand. The objective of the IRP rulemaking resolution is to make sure the council's IRP planning process does not overlook resources that can potentially serve customers, reduce system costs, improve reliability, or provide alternatives to traditional utility infrastructure. As such, the adoption of this resolution is essential to ensuring our 2027 IRP evaluates all of those distributed energy resources fairly and comprehensively. Are there any questions or comments? Anybody? OK, I will move to approve. Seconded by Council Member Harris. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. OK, the second item we have, item number four, this is the resolution to actually initiate the plan. This committee, we are considering a resolution to establish the procedural schedule for the 2027 integrated resource plan. So this one will formally begin the council's triennial process through which the council evaluates how energy norms. New Orleans E&O should plan to meet the city's future electricity needs while considering costs, reliability, resilience, environmental impacts, and customer interests. The 2027 IRP emphasizes transparency and meaningful public participation, as well as establishes multiple technical and public meetings throughout the process, including opportunities for the public to learn about the IRP, ask questions, and provide comments on the record. This is about making sure New Orleans plans for its energy futures deliberately and transparently. We certainly want an electric system that is reliable and resilient, but also one that appropriately considers energy efficiency, renewable resources, distributed energy resources, and the needs of our customers. This process gives the council stakeholders and public an option to rigorously evaluate Entergy New Orleans' resource choices before decisions are made about the city's energy future. Any questions? Okay. I will move. Second. Seconded by Councilmember Harris. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Perfect. Okay. Next up, we have Agenda Item 5, Entergy New Orleans. Entergy will provide an update on the widespread power outages that occurred across the city August 21st and 22nd. While you all are coming up to the table, I just have a few opening comments. Thank you all for being here, obviously, and thank you, I see some members of the community out here, to discuss the outages from Friday's thunderstorms. As regulators, we don't just represent our districts. We represent the entire city. So whether an outage occurs in my district, in District A, or in Algiers, we all share in the responsibility to ask the questions in a transparent way and hold the utility accountable. Last Friday, we had a severe thunderstorm event, and at its peak, left 14,600 customers without power, many for over four hours, and many in Algiers for over 28 hours. While this storm was intense, it was not unusual to our climate here, and something that we can expect due to climate change, that these storms and other extreme weather will continue to be a normal occurrence. Entergy already receives money from ratepayers to work to provide this reliable power every day, but as we've seen time and time again, as we've been in this room time and time again, fair weather outages, severe outages like this, continue to happen. And when I've done the math over the past – since January, the number of hours of outages, excluding this event, there's not a day that goes by where Entergy has not had a power outage. We must work towards a more reliable system. I know this is an open question that we have during our reliability, but investigation, we must figure out a way to credit people for these outages. Anyone that has an outage for over four hours, especially a business, for example Trader Joe's in Councilmember Harris' district, they don't have a generator, they were out of power for over six hours, and they had to throw all their food away, because you have certain health regulations that if you are between certain temperatures for over four hours, it's not healthy for people to keep that food. So we have to figure out a way. That is a question that is open during this reliability, but it is going to be something I'm going to be pushing, because our residents deserve to be compensated when they're suffering a power outage, especially in this heat, for that long. Finally, I'm going to plug the virtual power plant, which is the community power plan. If we have more batteries, we are working on that together. We are working together with that on that docket.

But that is important, because had some of these residents been able to have battery power backup, they may not have lost food in their fridge. They may have had AC that's working. They may have had, you know, if there was something, a medical device that they needed to have on. They would be able to have that. So we are obviously working together on that, but that is a huge thing that I want the community to realize, that we are, as a council, are working on these things to also provide reliable backup to you as well. So with that, I will let Entergy go ahead and present about the outages. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. I'm Deanna Rodriguez, President and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, and we appreciate the opportunity to be here and discuss these very important issues. And we also are eager to work with the council and our customers on addressing the outages, not just those that occur every day, but certainly preparing for the future where these storms, these pop-up storms, are becoming more and more common. And also, sometimes they're as harmful as a large storm that would impact our area. So we look forward to coming up with a resolution, at least a plan, and that's one of the reasons we've come to the council to talk about reliability and resilience and grid hardening overall. So we appreciate this. We're going to go through some of the agenda items that we put together to go through everything that you've asked that we present. So with that, I'd like to introduce our Vice President of Customer Service, Regulatory and Public Affairs. Sorry, I'm tongue-tied this afternoon, but if you want to take over, and then that way we'll sound like we know what we're talking about. We know what we're talking about. Good afternoon, Councilmembers. Sharonda Williams, Vice President of Regulatory and Public Affairs. We also have at the table our Vice President of Reliability, Dan Calamari, our Senior Customer Service Manager, Jessica Williams, and our Director of Regulatory Affairs, Harry Barton. There are two sort of major topics that we are prepared to talk to you all today about and that we think the public wants to hear about. One, the outages that happened on August 21st and 22nd. As you all know, that was a major event day due to severe weather, and we experienced outages, of course, and so our Vice President of Reliability, Dan Calamari, will talk to you about the outages, the damages that were caused, the restoration work that was done, and the work that our team did to make sure customers were restored as quickly and safely as possible after those outages. The second major topic being communications. We are aware that some of our customers may have received notifications about the outages that may have been inaccurate or confusing, and we're sorry that that occurred, but our Senior Customer Service Manager, Jessica Williams, will talk to us about what we do to notify and inform customers what happened that day during that severe storm that caused some inaccurate information to be conveyed and what we're doing now to correct that problem. So with that, I'll turn it over to Vice President Calamari to get started on the first topic. All right. Good afternoon. As Sharonda mentioned, we're going to talk about the thunderstorms that happened in the evening of August 21st. The slide that's being shown right now is a detailed timeline of the restoration, when the outages started, when we started to restore customers, and also when all the customers were finally restored. These types of thunderstorms, they provide little time to plan. However, we have line workers that are always ready to respond when it's least expected. While this allows us to immediately respond, we always have small crews strategically working on our system every evening and on the weekends that they can quickly divert to any unplanned outages or thunderstorms to immediately start patrolling and working to restore those customers as needed. In this particular case, we had those crews on the system. When it was safe to do so, we immediately started patrolling, identifying damaged areas, and then working with our control centers to restore what customers we could immediately. While they were patrolling, we were then contacting other N2G line workers to return back to work Friday, and we also were contacting our contract partners to get additional resources to help with the restoration. For the safety, just it's worth noting for the safety of our employees, they cannot get into their aerial equipment until the wind speeds reduce below 30 miles an hour. Sometimes that impacts returning some of our customers to service. We also have to take into account lightning in the area. Lightning can become very dangerous to our workers, and we have to wait until the lightning gets at least 10 miles away from where our work is being done. Depending on where the lightning is and where our workers are, some can work and some may not be able to work with that 10-mile radius. As our line workers patrolled and located damages, they worked with our control centers to secure whatever was damaged, make that scene safe, and we also restored as many customers as we could. Sometimes we can restore the customers, and later we have to take them back out to make the permanent repairs. We rather do that to minimize some of the impact, but sometimes that will lead to a second outage sometime in the future to make those permanent restoration efforts. Plum Orchard was an example where we had to do some of that work on Leed Street. We were able to restore a number of customers that night. Three of them had to stay out permanently until the repairs were made, and those led into well into Saturday. Then when we made the permanent repairs on Saturday, we had to take the initial customers back out that were once affected Friday night to make those repairs.

We want to make repairs that meet our design standards so we can continue to build that hardened system and not just patch something along the way. In this slide here that you see on the screen, the storm impacted our system. brought high winds, hail, lightning. It swept through the area with gusts of winds at 68 miles an hour that were recorded at the Lakefront Airport. The weather caused a lot of trees to come down, limbs to break, and they damaged our equipment. In total, we had 14,000 customer interruptions approximately. We peaked at 9,700 customers and we started restoring them, but we had some additional outages come in after we started restoring, given that total amount there. As talked earlier, we called in 144 resources to help with this restoration. That included the energy linemen and our contractors. Those also included our vegetation crews. Next, we'd like to talk through some of the larger outages in each district. We have a number of slides here. We'll just start in a chronological order with District A and B. Mostly, we're affected by similar outages that cross the boundaries of those two districts. Several customers in that Ferrette corridor were impacted there from a tree and tree limbs that contacted our power lines on Calhoun Street. We were able to deploy crews over there, isolate, remove those tree branches, and then restore those customers. Later that evening, we had one of our workers identify an energized downed power line near Saratoga and Napoleon. To make that scene safe for the given situation, we had to remotely open up a piece of equipment that de-energized a large section of customers. Once we got those customers isolated, we secured the scene, we returned as many customers that we could back to service while repairs were made. That outage there had some effect on Napoleon and then also up through Audubon. A very similar outage when they had that large house fire just the prior week. Those customers were impacted twice shortly. As we move into District C, District C had two locations, one on the East Bank and a very large one in Algiers. In the East Bank, we had lightning struck some of our equipment. We were able to isolate that damage there and restore those customers prior to midnight. As we move, as our crews started patrolling on the West Bank side in Algiers, we identified a lot of tree damage. One particular tree on Forest Park Lane where it was a customer-owned palm tree fell onto our power lines. We were able to remove that tree safely, restore those customers and that brought on about a thousand customers at that time following that tree removal. The second outage in Algiers was near Aurora and Warwick along that canal bank. There was a large tree in a customer's property that fell towards our line. It damaged a corner structure so the line makes a 90 degree turn. It fell on that structure and it damaged a number of spans going along the canal bank and then three poles up Aurora Street as well that we needed to make repairs to. That night, we had crews working to remove the tree damage. The following day, we found additional damage that I talked about a second ago. Those additional damages started to lead to additional time to restore those customers. We did work with our control center throughout the night studying our electrical system to see where we could pick up and energize additional customers. We were able to energize about 1,700 around 8 a.m. Saturday morning, but that did still leave about 500 to 600 customers still out. That lasted well into the evening time and into the night there on Saturday. In District D, we had some damage in Pontchartrain Park with some trees. We also had some impact along Downman Road as well. Those customers were restored Friday night. We did have an additional outage with a broken cross on that you see on the screen here that impacted the St. Rock and 7th Ward neighborhood on Saturday. We were able to restore the majority of those customers within an hour. District E was another area of our system that was impacted in multiple areas. The majority of those customers were between Chef Highway and Dwyer Road from around Reed and also around Crowder and in that Plum Orchard neighborhood. This is the area where we actually had four different locations in Plum Orchard that we had to make repairs to. Some were vegetation-related, some were lightning associated with those. On Leeds Street, that particular street, we actually restored customers the night, as I mentioned earlier, and we had to take those customers back out to make the permanent repairs to install some new poles and some new wire. While that work was going on, we had another piece of equipment that also was damaged that caused a larger outage in that area. We immediately were able to pull off some of our resources to address that situation and restore the majority of those customers while we fixed that piece of equipment that created the larger outage there. The majority of that larger, unexpected outage there, those customers will restore within an hour as well. That's a summary of the major different outages and the impact to our system that we had. At this time, I'll turn it over to Jessica, our Senior Manager of Customer Service, that will talk through some of our communication throughout the storm. Thank you. I just wanted to let you know, Councilmember King, the technical issue that we had only impacted the customers that were out in Algiers. It did not impact all customers that were out during the storm. Just to share an overview of the communication process and that customer's experience during an outage, when an outage occurs, they get the initial outage text. As we update the restoration time, they get updates throughout the outage of the new restoration time. Once customers are re-energized, they will receive a final text to let them know that they should have power and everything's back to normal.

Then I'll go into the technical issues that we were having. We're out of information. Can I ask you a quick question? Are all of your customers signed up for text messages? What do you do if you don't have the ability to text them? Customers have a preferred method. They can do email or text, or they can get a robocall. All of our customers are signed up for one. We don't have customers that don't select one of those options. Are you going to get into what the technical issues with the communication in Algiers was? Are you going to get into that? I'm not going to dive deep. I'm not technical. We're still looking into that. It came to our attention over the weekend. We've been kind of having those calls throughout the week. More to come on exactly what happened, but this is just kind of high level to give an explanation. So our outage information system, it experienced a technical issue which limited our ability to display or send accurate outage updates. This means that customers may have had an outage and they did not get updated information or had not received an initial text at all. Our teams monitored the issue immediately once we learned about the customers not receiving messages. And we worked across our operations team and our technical groups to correct the notifications. This meant that some customers may have not received the delay notifications. And so we learned that it was 11 hours before some of those customers received their first notification. And that's when we were alerted and we reached out to our teams. The delay notifications did not impact the delay of the restoration work. Even while the notification systems were impacted, our field crews and operations team continued restoring power based on real time data. The communication did not affect our ability to detect, respond, or re-energize customers. We know the customers were reporting outages and receiving notifications that they were not having an outage and we understand the frustration there. So what we did is we worked with our outage team to update the message. So now instead of saying you don't have an outage, we're just going to say thank you for notifying us and we're going to look into it. And we are implementing additional safeguards and working with our technical partners to address any issues that may lead to customers receiving inaccurate notifications. If customers ever notice information that seems inaccurate, we do encourage them to report the outages through the mobile app, our website, or by calling us at our 809 outage number and we'll address that immediately. And I did want to let you all know for the customers that had the outages and Algiers in the east, the extended outages, we did draft an email and send those to those customers and we provided them a hotline number so our CSMs get that information directly and they can speak to the customer. I'm happy to answer any questions. So Ms. Williams, whoever, the first question I have is this was a relatively short notice storm, not the strongest storm, so people are very concerned if if this caused up to 24 hours, 28 hours of cases, power outage, what is being done to make sure a tropical storm or a stronger storm doesn't cause more of an outage? I can jump in, Councilmember, and then others may have more to add. I think in terms of preparing for future storms, we want to continue to proactively invest in hardening the grid and making it more resilient. I think at the last meeting we presented to you all on the status of our projects of the Phase 1 of the existing Resilience Plan. Those projects are nearing completion, and we have seen impacts in terms of storm preparedness and the resilience of the grid, reliability of the grid. As you all know, none of the structures that were touched by the Phase 1 Resilience Plan were affected by Tropical Storm Arthur, Tropical Storm Bertha, and that was true of this last week in storms. So I think to prepare for storms like this, you know, both pop-up storms and bigger named storms in the future, we want to continue working with you all in the collaborative process to identify and execute on projects that can harden the grid, make it more resilient and reliable. The Phase 1 investments were just like Part 1 of the Council-ordered process through which we would determine a system and storm resiliency plan for the entire grid in New Orleans. We want to keep working with you all to execute on that and prepare the city and the grid for future events like this one and for bigger ones. Okay, and I believe it was stated that there were no public trees, no trees in the public right of way that hit the poplar line. These were all privately owned trees? So on the uptown side, those trees were in the public servitude, but a lot of the damages were trees in the customers' front or backyards that impacted a lot of our equipment. On the west bank? Yes. Okay. And my last, more of a comment, I understand storms pop up, nothing you can do about that, you've got to react the best you can with what you have, but a lot of people are just frustrated, and you can imagine being in the heat for 12 to 24 hours where we're frustrated with the lack of communication or being told that there is no outage, and you're in the sun baking because there is an outage, and just not, you know, when it's hot, you're hungry, you don't know what to turn, and you're getting told wrong information or no information, that increases your frustration levels. So what is set in place? I know Ms. Williams gave a lot, but if we just kind of make it plain, I see a handful of people from Bocage, from Aurora Village, from Huntley Village, from Aurora Gardens, excuse me, who are here because they're concerned that, hey, this can happen when almost the peak of hurricane season. We need to have reliable communication.

So what is being done to make sure that communication is accurate and reliable, in very lame and simple terms? First of all, I also want to apologize for the errors in communication. That was not acceptable, but it was also not intentional. We found a glitch in the software that we're working with our IT people as well as the manufacturer of this software to understand what happened, and it was in that one specific area. That doesn't fix exactly what you just stated in terms of the folks not getting the correct information, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be when somebody reports an outage and then they're told there is no outage occurring. When that happened, we had our IT folks work through all of Saturday to do a workaround so that they could address it immediately. Now what we're doing in the future to mitigate that is we're looking at the process, we're trying to find out exactly, that's one of the reasons Jessica said, we're still analyzing where that breakdown occurred, and we will come back with and certainly promise that this will be fixed. Certainly not anything intentional, we're looking at all kinds of opportunities for enhancements to our communication, both directly via text and also through the app. The other thing that we could also encourage just generally, because it did work in other parts of the city, is where Councilmember Willard suggested, is how many people are signed up on the mobile app. If they can, we would invite them to sign up, they can opt in, and that is an opportunity for us to have that two-way communication that we intend to improve. Thank you. Last comment, there are also people who feel like allergies gives the short end of the stick, and this was once again that happening. I just wanted to relay that and reassure the people of allergies, this was just a glitch, it wasn't anything, of course not on purpose, but nothing that was overlooked or could have been immediately corrected, it's just technology and things happen. That's it. Exactly. Thank you. Before you go, Councilmember Willard, I have one question about when you guys are doing these replacements and repairs, when you have an outage, are you replacing the poles that come down with the resilient ones that you are using with your resiliency program? Same thing goes for cross arms and all that. Yeah, that's my understanding, and Dan can correct me if I'm wrong, but that anytime we do a repair and replacement, we're replacing what came down with equipment that meets the new resiliency standards. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Willard. Thank you, Chairwoman McCarran. I don't have the app, I don't intend on downloading the app, so I understand it's a glitch, hopefully you guys can get to the bottom of it quickly so we don't have to deal with this again. Not to belabor the point, but when you're sitting in darkness and you get a text message from the power utility saying your power's on, I mean, it's going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. A few questions. What's your process to remove dead trees that are close to power lines? Yeah, so if they're on public servitude, we work with Parks and Parkways, and plenty of times they're reaching out to us and saying, hey, we have this tree that we want you to take down because it might be close to the power lines. If it's on a customer property, they can definitely reach out to us and we will bring it down to a certain level to make it safe for a tree vendor to take it down the rest of the way. If it's a tree that we identify that's on a customer's property that we feel is a danger, we will work with the customer to say, hey, can we take the tree down? It poses a risk, a reliability risk to us, and sometimes we'll work with them to facilitate that activity. Is that prioritized at all? Because, I mean, if you have dead trees close to power lines and you have a serious storm like we had this past weekend, that's asking for outages. Yes, we definitely want the trees removed. If they pose a damage, you'll see with the pictures, a lot of those were all green trees, so they would be hard to detect on whether or not they were rotten or had termites or anything like that that posed some damage. But if we see dead limbs, dead trunks of trees, and we're patrolling that line, we'll raise that question. Could you also share, Dan, what we do before a storm, if we see a storm coming? Yes. So, if there's a named storm and we see it coming 96 hours out, if they let us have that much time, but even if it's less time than that, we will send our crews out patrolling our critical circuits that have sewage and water board feeders or fire stations, senior living homes, feeders that are on a list that we want to make sure that stay in as much as possible. We'll go out and patrol those. If we see a branch, we'll immediately make those trims to improve the reliability on those major events. Okay. It looks like from this past weekend, the outages were caused because of damage to poles, cross arms, wires, transformers. After an event like this, do you guys do sort of a retrospect to look at your inventory? The reason I'm asking is because I'm curious how many of these poles were already in a condition to where they were going to fall over, be knocked down. How many of the cross arms were strong winds away from being moved offline? How many of the wires were already somewhat frayed? And then, you know, you get a big event like we had this weekend and they all go down. I'm asking because I guess where I'm getting into that is your spending on reliability. So, if you have any input, comments on that. Well, I think we have to distinguish if the cross arm fell or if the pole was damaged, it was all done. In this case, 90% of it was caused by vegetation falling on these cross arms. So, that was one of the issues.

I think your inventory question and sort of your question is more about what we're doing on a daily basis, on an inspection basis, and that is something that we have built into our process. I think we can probably get more to that in the reliability discussion, but we're happy to answer some of these questions. I don't know, Dan, if you want to speak. Do you enhance or do like a subsequent inspection after an event like this weekend? Yes. Because you may have had poles that are still upright. You may have wires that are okay, you know. You may have cross arms that are okay, but the next time we have an event like this weekend, it's all going offline. And sometimes it happens a day or so later, and we saw that because you don't know the damage that it's caused kind of down the line. that back and forth on the lightning strikes. That's right. And we actually have one pole right now identified that it didn't cause an outage. We have secured it, but we have a design job being created so we can replace it with a stronger pole. At the moment, because of the different equipment on there, we wanted to make sure we put the right pole back in that location. So we do flag things. If it isn't put back the way we want it, we'll come back and we'll get the customers in. We'll come back and replace it with a hardened pole if we don't have the right equipment, the right material at that moment in time. OK. The last thing I want to touch on is I saw the email where you're declaring, I think it was Friday and Saturday, as major event days. Is that accurate? The 21st. Just the 21st? That's listed on our outage report as a major event day. OK, just the 21st. All right, so that was one question I had. Can you go into what that means in practical terms? Well, from a reliability perspective, it doesn't impact our safety scores. I know that sounds very technical to the public, but we put it in our outage report because we just wanted to be transparent about the outages, although they were designated as major event days due to severe weather under the IEEE standards. So the determination is made by, was that a regulatory body, a governing standard? So the way it works is if the outage, in this particular case, if an outage started on August 21st. Yeah, walk me through it. So the way it starts is it's all based on the total sum of customer minutes of the outages that started on a specific day. So if an outage started on August 21st, but did not, the customers did not restore until the 22nd, all those customer minutes add up to determine whether or not it meets the major event day threshold. So it's just addition on all the outages by minute? Yes, so one customer out for one minute is one customer minute. And our threshold is millions of customer minutes for a given day. But it's only focused on, so every day it starts over. And so the calculation starts with, did you have an outage on that day? And how long did it take to restore the customers? And it's incremental. So if you restored 1,000 of 2,000 customers within an hour, that's only 60,000 CMs. The other 1,000 customers, those minutes are added up on the back end. I guess, is the determination beyond intergy? Yes. So it's beyond. On how to determine that. I'm just a little concerned that the reliability score isn't, like Friday won't factor into the reliability score, right? That's essentially what it means. That's correct. OK. But that's a national standard. It's a national standard. Any idea, like ballpark, how many major event days we have on average a year? So last year, the only one we had was low shed event. And this year, the only one we had was on August 21st. OK, so we've only had one this year? Yes. Even the tropical storms never met that threshold. So those outages are all in our reliability metrics. All right. Thank you for walking me through that. That's all I have. Thank you. Council Member Hughes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry I was a little late. I had another event. But I'm going to start by beating a slight dead horse when we talk about lightning. I do want us to just acknowledge that lightning is getting more furious and consistent. And as we think about resiliency, we're going to have to confront, what do we do to combat a lot of these lightning outages? Because we're seeing a lot of them in District E. So that's that. Let me ask about the outage in Venetian Isles that happened yesterday. Do you have an update on that outage? There was vegetation issues. A limb came down on the power line. It did not do any damage. So we just needed to clear that vegetation, and then we were able to restore those customers. OK. I know there's been a situation where, I think, Parks and Parkways, correct me if I'm wrong, has asked you all to hold off on performing vegetation maintenance. Have we gotten through that impasse, or are we still working through that? We've been working with Parks and Parkways to address the issues that they raised that led them to send us a communication at the end of June asking us to stop vegetation work. We, again, have come up with a plan with them to address some of the issues. I believe that we will be given the go-ahead to continue our work within the coming days. OK. Great. And I will certainly be lending my voice to push Parks and Parkways to bring this to some type of resolution so that you all can continue vegetation work. In closing, let me just say, Sunday, Madam CEO, and to all of you, I had a chance to be thoroughly briefed with the entire leadership team. I appreciate that. It allowed me to communicate with my constituents. And between Friday night and throughout the day Saturday, we also had an event Sunday night with a transformer that caught on fire. But Jessica, you and I were communicating in real time. And as you all know, I have a lot of elderly residents, so they're not going to use an app.

But that real time communication really helps me to be able to communicate real time with my constituents. And so throughout the weekend, I just really appreciate you all, you Jessica in particular, being so responsive and allowing me to be responsive to my constituents. So that really means a lot. And to the entire team, I thank you for the substantive call that we had on Sunday and look forward to continuing to strengthen our reliability and resilience. So thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Council Member King. Yeah, quick question. How many linemen were working in Algiers the night of the? We had in total 42 in the Algiers area, plus another 25 vegetation folks. All right. And why weren't the feeders switched to alternative source that night? So we weren't able, we were studying to make sure that the customers we did restore by 8 AM, we needed to make sure that where we, the feeders that load, the usage of power that those customers could handle it. So there's a lot of work going on in Algiers with some drainage work, some resiliency work. And we needed to make sure when we did turn the power back on that we didn't have wire fail somewhere else that prolonged a bigger outage in more customers. So we had to have our engineers do some calculations through the night while we determined where to put those customers. And lastly, why didn't the two main feeders going out trigger a priority response? We had a priority of resources immediately on those feeders in Algiers. Well, that's a moot point then. Just some questions I was asked. All right, look, again, we know things happen. Not saying point the finger, but if we could improve the communications. And Ms. Williams, you always do a great job. And also shout out to Ms. Owens, who's always doing a great job. She was able to communicate with me. And I was getting emails out and making phone calls as soon as possible. So people had some sort of idea what's happened, but you can't communicate with thousands of people that fast, only a handful. So thank you to the communication team, Ms. Laura Owen, and Ms. Jessica Williams, appreciate it. And I did want to say that Lauren Owens is here today. We know that a lot of customers were going to come in person. So she is back there to take any customer issues. Thanks. Madam Chair, I neglected to acknowledge Amy as well. So please send my thanks to Amy. Thank you. Council Member Green. I would just like to thank your team, too, for the communications. You've heard that mentioned a lot. Sometimes I know that we can't avoid lightning strikes. We can't avoid, in my case, in District D, people running into poles. But I don't know. I never knew that that happened as much as I found out. But I do want to ask you to communicate on one issue, because on the other night, Saturday night, there were a lot of people out in the St. Rock area for a lot longer than the majority got it back on. So I don't want them to think that we're ignoring them because we saw them. Can you explain what happened on North Tante, which is in the St. Rock community? There was a cross on, but they didn't get power back until 4 AM. So I don't want them to think that. Certainly, I said I'm familiar with them, because I've spoken to a number of people. And maybe you can get back to me so I can share it. I'm in the St. Rock community on North Tante. Folks were out until 4 AM. That outage started on Friday night, and it was 4 AM on Saturday. Yes, so that particular feeder, we patrolled it out. We found a broken junk. Do me a favor. Give me the technical. What do you mean? Yeah, I'm sorry. Power line. We patrolled the power line. We found a broken jumper in that area. We isolated it. And then we had to make those repairs, restoring those customers. When we, after we made the repairs, we did find some additional damage, which prolonged that outage that we needed to secure there as well. Okay, and I know I have the power to ask you for more details. I do appreciate the text messages that tell us that the, you know, the cross arm was out, but when it lasts a long time, I've got to share more information with customers. You gave me that opportunity, but I made a call and I found out a little bit more, because when you're out on a Friday night, I want anybody who's watching, and it goes to Saturday morning at four, the fact that the majority of customers were on earlier than that doesn't take up for the fact that you're sweltering, you know, on one of the hottest nights of the year. But I do want to go back to the fact that I was able to get more information. I wanted you to share with the public, so it came from you and not from me, and the communication is appreciated. I also want to go back to the modes of communication, and I know Jessica went through them, but we have it via, make sure I get this correct, via email, text, the app, and then we also call people. So if, because we understand not everybody wants to sign up for the app, there are other people, perhaps elderly, that don't know how to do that, and so they would appreciate a call, but calls do go out. So once we know an event has happened that all customers that are intended to result in some kind of outage should receive communication. Okay, any other comments? Okay, with that, I've got three cards of public comment. I can't read your handwriting on the first, but I think your last name is Hearst. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Ledwina Hearst. That's L-Y-D-W-I-N-A. I reside at 5711 Call Out Cote in Algiers and Bocotch. My comment is concerning lack of communication. I've heard the explanations. I've heard the apologies. However, I am signed up to receive text messages. I did not receive one. After three telephone calls, the last one at 3.15 in the morning, I was asked the same questions and I was given the same information that there were no outages in that area. That was 10 to 11 hours later.

I was able to override the app, I mean, the automated system and get a human being who asked me the same questions and gave the same comment. So if the automated system does not have an update, why is it that the human being 10 to 11 hours later is still saying the exact same thing that there's no outage in the area? This is unacceptable for seniors, people who are on medical apparatuses like oxygen, sleep app machines, those with medications that need refrigeration. You have no updates to let you know what the next planned step that you should take to take care of those situations. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hearst. Next, I have David Wadley and then followed by Mary with an L. Sorry, I'm mispronouncing. Hi. Hi. I'm pretty old. I was maintaining mainframe computers back when they were dropping them on helicopters in Vietnam to do missile control. And I've been in the IT industry ever since. I don't know everything, but I know a thing or two. And I know that this isn't just a glitch when your energy maps go out. They always go out. I've lived 20 years in one address. I've never had a power failure show up on the map correctly. I've argued all night with repeated calls to somebody in Atlanta who doesn't even know where I live. I know what I'm doing and the power is out. We need to get somebody to fix it. And in the end, I have to interface with actual energy staff that have feet on the ground before they go, oh yeah, we know what to do about that. And you guys are guilty of just looking at every glitch at a time as, oh, another glitch. Oh, another glitch. I don't see you studying the series of glitches. I don't see you questioning whether you've got any valid data at all to measure things on. I see you are holding yourself to some kind of national standard. But I think what you need to be doing is having accurate data to start with. And I don't think that you're doing that. I have never had an experience that's been good with this. And I don't know why you don't coordinate with other utilities and with the local resources here that are responding to emergencies. Instead, it goes off to somebody in Atlanta. I made a little AI page that expresses my frustration. And you're welcome to have some of those. Thank you. Mary Loden. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. And then followed by Zachary Stein. I just want to ask if somebody can come from energy and look in my backyard. My power pole is like this. It's cracked at the bottom. I reported it three years ago. And it's pulling the lines. And it's almost touching the fence from here to here. So if you can come by, I'd love for it to get fixed. I think we have Ms. Laura Owen right there in the back. Coming to check you out. Thank you. Zachary Stein, followed by Lizzie Pitt. Hi there. My name is Zachary Stein. I'm from the Broadmoor neighborhood. My main question deals with what was mentioned about the severe day regulation. It seems to me, just by what was described here, that it incentivizes slower response. Because if you can keep people out of power longer, and then it doesn't impact your resilience score, that seems to incentivize you to protect your resiliency score by being slower in responses. I'm not saying Intergy is doing that. But it seems to me that that regulation doesn't make sense. And the purpose of the system is what it does. And I don't see how that incentivizes anybody to respond quickly or invest in resiliency. Especially when Intergy announced over $250 million of dividends on July 31st. So if they have money for that, they have money to invest in resiliency here. Thank you. Thank you. Lizzie Pitts. Hi. I'm Lizzie Pitts. I live uptown. I had a few questions and comments. We're talking about a pretty severe storm. But you self-congratulated yourself several times on not having many power outages during Bertha. I don't know if anyone else was here. But I sat on my front porch the whole time. There was no wind, no rain, and no lightning. Yet I heard my transformer blow up. And I didn't have power for some time. So I don't know how that is explained by these storm effects. There clearly have to be other things going on affecting resiliency of the grid that are not related. You mentioned tree contact at Saratoga and Napoleon. I lived there between Valence and Napoleon on Saratoga from the end of 22 until 2025. I had weekly power outages greater than four hours any time the wind blew. So I don't understand how the power lines can't withstand a tree touching them. I had to buy a window unit that I could plug into a solar power generator so that I didn't lose my food every time. Which brings me to Councilwoman McCarran's question about compensation for people that lost power for more than four hours. She brought up Trader Joe's having to throw out all of their food. In my opinion, it's kind of on them for not having a generator in New Orleans. And they're a $15 billion company. But the median income in Algiers is somewhere around $80,000. So when these people lose all of this power, they not only have to throw out food, but if you're on any refrigerated medication and it goes above 8 degrees Celsius, then you also have to toss it out. And we all know how expensive our medications are. The last thing I want to say is you're touting your smartphone app. You're not having the awareness that people without smartphones cannot download your app to begin with. Thank you. Thank you. I have one last comment card from Alexis Myers. Hello. I'm Dr. Alexis Myers. I live in Mid-City, 3004 Canal Street, to be specific. And mostly for information, it was good to hear that resilience-minded infrastructure updates are underway. I do have a pole right by my apartment that consistently becomes an issue during storms. There's always someone from Entergy who comes out and fixes it.

And from this conversation, since storms seem to be a major driver of the damage, I think it's worth Entergy clarifying what resilience measures are in place around that vegetation management. Are you using aerial or satellite imagery to identify high-risk trees, remote sensing that can detect a down line before the crew finds it on patrols, or regular trim cycles for the areas, seeing repeat outages separate from patrols. I'd like to understand remote preventative surveillance. ahead of times, right? Like we know that outages keep happening in certain areas, so are there things that are also being implemented to flag stress or damage on the lines in real time, smart meters that signal the moment power drops, so the location is known immediately, and can then guide where those patrols are happening, and it makes sense that parks and parkways are stressed. You know, vegetation is important in urban areas, tree canopies matter, and flood control, heat reduction, neighborhood characters, so I think that'd be really great if there was a consider of a coordinated effort between Parks and Parkway and Entergy to kind of look at like how they can quickly kind of do safety hazards while making sure that the cuts are handled responsibly for the two different efforts. Trees are good, trees also can be bad in certain other situations. Thank you. Thank you. All right, any other comments from this? Okay, great, thank you, appreciate it. Okay. Our last update here is a presentation from the Port and the City of New Orleans Law Department. However, the Port was unavailable to come today to explain themselves on how this has taken such a significant amount of time for quiet zones in District A, and I do have someone from the administration, Andrew Tuzolo, who will walk us through the timeline from Law Department, but I do want to just explain why we're talking about this here today. So the District A office has been working on this process of a quiet zone near Children's Hospital for at least three years. Prior to me being elected council member, I worked on it as a staff person. The uptown neighbors have been invested in this project for a long time and want to see this happen. The city has set aside capital funds to pay for all of this, but the money can't be spent because we still don't have a CEA signed by the Port. Until this morning, after lots of additional pressure from us, from the administration, the Port has sent over a revised CEA finally after several months and years of going through this process. So I'm just gonna read an email from the Port, but I want to stress that we have requested several updates since I have taken office and received little to no substantive response. Per Tamika Bryant, Chief Strategy Officer at the Port, the Port received the engineering design proposal from HDR last Thursday, and we are currently reviewing the proposal. There is a $20,000 increase, so they will have to take the contract back to the Board for approval, which is what they have been saying for months. The Port will plan to bring the agreement to the Port's Board in September, which I will attend, if necessary, to get this through, and update the agreement to reflect the changes made by HDR. We know this fell off law department's radar when the new administration took office. We know additional review was needed by Office of Resilience to get it up to speed, but that does not change the fact that the CEA was unreleased by law department from BRASS after pending with the Port for 198 days that the Port had the CEA. That being said, my office will continue to press on the Port for this, and I know the administration will as well, and I'll let Andrew speak to the administration's work on this. Thank you, Council Member. Thank you, Chairwoman. Briefly, I just wanna, I might be the special counsel, but I do not represent the law department here. I'm not a lawyer for the city. The city attorney graciously put together a quick summary regarding this. Pretty simply, this is one of those situations where the city has actually done everything it was supposed to do. We are now waiting for the Port. I think the number of days right now is roughly 198 days that we've been waiting for the CEA. I hear Council Member Caron mentioned that they delivered a red line this morning. Just briefly, the CEA went through BRASS review way back in December of 2025. The law department approved it, and it went to the CAO Jan 2. It went to the Port Jan 5. There have been back and forth. The law department has consistently requested updates from the Port. I think I totaled it four or five separate times. There was some engineering issue that I think they wanted to work through. The Port failed to give updates on those multiple times. I do wanna praise the law department under the city attorney. They were really diligent on this, Council Members, but we didn't get any action until Council Member Caron sent them a note, and they hustled up and got their cells together on a red line this morning. So I'm just sort of here to send this summary along. We stand ready, obviously, to continue to work with the Council on this issue. I know this is maybe a district issue. I know there are other conversations about crossings, grade crossings in District C as well, that this would eventually be a process that I think District C has looked at in the past. So we certainly would like to see this move more quickly. I know the uptown neighbors, some of which are actually my neighbors, personally would love to see this occur. So if there are any questions, I'd have to answer them pretty straightforward. Thanks to your work, Council Member Caron, to get that moving along, and we'll be happy to continue to press the button to get this figured out. As soon as they give us that back, I know the law department is now reviewing that red line, and they said they would be reviewing it immediately upon transmission, which I think was just this morning.

Any questions, members? If there are, happy to take them. Council Member Ricking. Well, as you know, this is also a huge issue in District C. You're on the e-mails, and you can see the frustration from the residents that's often directed to myself, the law department, the health department, any other department within City Hall. So how can, one, we extend the services to that Homer Plessy Way Street that has several crossings, and two, we're in the process of setting up a bit of a community meeting to update the constituents in that neighborhood of what's happening, because some people think that the choir zones are completed in District 8, and that's not the case. So how can you all help us establish that meeting and have a person like yourself who is knowledgeable in this? Well, you know what's funny, Council Member, this has a long history. I believe two administrations ago, or at least last administration, said this couldn't be done at all, I think. Then-Council Member Geruso pressed very hard for years to get this close to the finish line. What's interesting is that, as you all might know, we used to own this railroad. The Ports Railroad actually used to be our railroad, the City of New Orleans Railroad, which would have made negotiations a little simpler. Now it's owned by the Port of New Orleans, a state entity. Their board obviously needs to approve certain things in a certain time. The issues in District C are multifaceted, actually. I think you're speaking of the north or southern, the Shunting Yard, that's what that's called. Where they break down trains, yeah. Yeah, St. Claude, which is a Port of New Orleans railroad around the corner. And then, of course, by the NSA, right by Poland Avenue, there's also another grade crossing that causes residents a lot of concerns regarding noise. This is something that, surprisingly, can be done. We know this. Why do we know this can be done? Because if anyone ever drives on Metairie Road, right through Old Metairie, they have a quiet zone all throughout Old Metairie. So there are no train horns in Old Metairie. They made this change several years ago. So any sort of discussions about this being impossible or unwieldy, it's been done in Old Metairie, it can be done. And it's being, hopefully, done in Council Member McCarran's district. And to your point, Council Member King, it should be, if residents can get this together, I think, I don't want to speak too freely on this, but ultimately, there is some liability that the city takes on. Because without the train horns, the railroads want to make sure that if they hit anything, that they're not ultimately held responsible because they didn't blow a horn. There is some considerations that are required through the Federal Railroad Administration, which is really how this gets done. This has a federal component, as well. But, Council Member, I know that the example that they're setting up town probably could be replicated. And I'm sure, if we can get this done this way, I'm sure the Port will see that they would be happy to work with you, too, Council Member King, and we'd be happy to stand with you to work with them to get this done for your district, too. Thank you. I also really like trains. I'm happy to talk about this. Okay, thank you so much for that update. You know, if the Port or if their board is watching this, this is going to get done. And I will assist other Council Members working through this project in their district, as well. But we will work on getting this through the Law Department, and then it will be back up to the Port to sign this. And I hope that in September, I can tell my neighborhood neighbors I can tell my neighborhood groups that we have assigned CEA, and we can actually start the process for this. So, appreciate you coming down here and giving us this update. With that, I will motion to adjourn. Go. Anybody else? Okay, second. We are adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.