Like most Entergy employees who lived through hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Deborah Boudreaux remembers it well. She was known as Deborah Kramer, then, in the post she still holds as administrative assistant in Entergy Texas’ Winnie Service Center.

And her memories of Hurricane Rita don’t revolve around the damage to her home. In fact, she will tell you that she didn’t really have much damage to her property–a portable building destroyed and vinyl siding blown off her home. What she recalls vividly was a long, stressful evacuation journey.

Boudreaux, her son, her parents and the family dog climbed into a pickup truck for they hoped would be uneventful 8 ½-hour journey to Shepherd, Texas.

“We stopped in Livingston when we ran out of gas,” she said. Roadside assistance refused to come because ‘a hurricane is on the way.’ So the four of them and the dog spent the night sleeping in the truck until they were able to leave the next morning. Livingston is a small community, but that night it was crowded with people fleeing the advancing storm.

Ironically, when the family finally reached the small town of Carlos to rest, it wasn’t quite the safe haven they were expecting. According to Boudreaux, Rita whipped winds up to 80 mph.

Looking back on the days following the storm, Boudreaux said she was impressed at how quickly the contract crews and others who came to the Winnie area fell in line with our employees and were dedicated to restoring power quickly and safely.

Rita Puts Louis Louvier and Family into FEMA Trailer

Louis Louvier, utility foreman for the Port Arthur network, was a reliability serviceman for Entergy Texas, living comfortably with his family in a recently remodeled home in Port Neches. When Hurricane Rita began its threatening journey to the Southeast Texas coastline, he sent his family out of harm’s way to stay with relatives in Woodville.

He, on the other hand, remained behind with the core team like many employees and spent the night before the storm sleeping in a truck at the Beaumont Service Center.

Rita hadn’t even finished punishing Port Neches when Louvier returned to check on his house and found 60 mph winds still whipping through the area. At first glance, the house seemed to have escaped serious damage. Some trees had rolled across the roof, taking out shingles, but did not puncture the surface. The interior was an entirely different story. Wind-blown water came through the front of the house and Louvier sloshed through it as he walked from room to room.

Louvier felt disgust at what he saw and relief that his family was safe not too far away. He busied himself pulling up carpet, chiseling out parquet floors and cutting sheetrock four feet up from the floor.

The Louviers spent five months living in a FEMA trailer in their driveway, waiting for repairs to be finished to their home. Looking back on those times, he can smile about living in cramped quarters for so long.

“My son is 6/1″ and was so tall he couldn’t even stand up in the trailer. He moved out. I’m not a big person, but my feet stuck out over the end of the bed,” he said.

Reminiscing about his experiences working restoration, Louvier said it was gratifying to get the work done and get power restored to customers at such a rapid pace.

“I don’t want to go through that again,” he added. ​ ​​​

But just after arriving in his hometown of Sulphur, La., he found out he would have to get back in the car and leave. Hurricane Rita was coming.

So this former meter services employee – now a senior engineering assistant – evacuated with his family to his brother’s house in Oakdale, La.

As the massive Rita made its way onto land near the Louisiana/Texas border around 2:30 on the morning of Sept. 24, 2005, Coleman couldn’t sleep. In fact, he and his brother-in law, Warren Faulk (Entergy serviceman first class in Lake Charles), headed back to the Lake Charles/Sulphur area around 7:30 a.m. that same day because they wanted to arrive as soon as possible.

When they got to Lake Charles, all the bridges were closed. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that Coleman was able to make it to the company’s staging site at the West Calcasieu Arena – and because he had left so early, he was the first one there.

“It was so chaotic all over the area and hard to get around,” Coleman said. “But our staging site was still there. I waited a couple of hours before our crews safely arrived to get set up for work.”

But arrive they did. Coleman said he spent the first four days after Rita at Lake Charles’ Burton Coliseum helping with logistics at the staging site there. After that, he was asked to head into the field where he spent the next few weeks assisting with restoration.

“I worked with Harvey Ancelet (also an Entergy serviceman first class in Lake Charles who has since retired) the rest of the time and helped him and his crew with running lines and re-fusing line fuses,” Coleman said. “We were working with crews out of Oklahoma and were instrumental in restoring power to the Westlake-Maplewood area between Lake Charles and Sulphur.”

Coleman described returning from the devastation of Katrina to face the destruction Rita did to southwest Louisiana as surreal. But, he said, it was a true learning experience.

“I wasn’t expecting the kind of damage we got – I never expected the total devastation I had just seen from Katrina to happen at home,” he added. “And the hardest part was the effect I knew it would have on my two young girls.”

Coleman’s daughters – then one and five years old – were safely away with his wife, but because their Sulphur home was destroyed, he knew their lives wouldn’t be the same when they returned.

“The hardest part of the entire experience for me was when I had to call my wife and let her know the bad news about our home,” he said. “And because there wasn’t much left that was able to be saved, I knew it would be hard on our kids.”

But there was a silver lining. Coleman was able to save a few of his daughters’ toys and was able to rebuild thanks to the help of his family – his Entergy family.

“I couldn’t have gotten through it all without the support of my family here at Entergy,” he said. “Their help when it came time to rebuild my home was a gift from God – I didn’t have to worry at all. I am truly lucky to have family and friends like I do here at Entergy.”

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All of these descriptions were used this week to describe Entergy’s storm response since hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast 10 years ago.

Dennis Dawsey, vice president of customer service for Entergy Louisiana, Entergy Gulf States Louisiana and Entergy New Orleans, spoke Tuesday at a special briefing of the Gulf Coast Power Association.

“When you look at the devastation and impact of the combination of Katrina and Rita, they were six times more impactful to Entergy than any previous storm we ever experienced,” Dawsey said. “We had to rethink every process we were using. Whatever we did in past storms wasn’t enough. It was a difficult, difficult restoration.”

Dawsey recounted just how devastating the hurricanes were. With Katrina, 1.1 million customers lost power – 1/3 of the Entergy service territory. Damaged in the storm were 3,000 miles of transmission lines, 30,000 miles of distribution lines and 17,400 distribution poles. Nearly 2,000 New Orleans-based employees were evacuated. Two million calls were made from customers – as many as 46,708 calls per hour at the peak of the storm. Restoration was completed in 42 days.

Just 26 days later came Hurricane Rita. In four states, 800,000 customers were without power, all transmission connections from Louisiana to Texas were severed, 341 transmission lines and 443 substations were out of service. Over 11,000 distribution poles were destroyed and 1.23 million customer calls were received. Restoration was completed in 21 days.

“We had to amass the largest restoration workforce we had ever encountered. When you amass workers like that, you have to keep safety first. It’s a very chaotic situation,” he said.

More than 30,000 restoration workers were engaged in the two back-to-back storms. From feeding and housing the workers to making sure employees received proper medical care and vaccines, Dawsey said the logistics were crucial.

Dawsey’s presentation was fascinating to many in the audience, including LSU electrical engineering major Sung Jung. Jung happens to be the son of Jai Jung, a nuclear engineer at the Waterford 3 plant.

“When Hurricane Katrina swept New Orleans in August 2005, I was 11 years old and just finished a week in middle school,” Sung Jung said. “My family evacuated to Alexandria, Louisiana, where my brothers and my mom stayed until December. I remember that my father, who worked for Entergy, had to return early to join the reconstruction effort.

“Now, ten years have passed since Katrina/Rita, and Entergy’s presentation today showed me exactly what lessons were learned since then,” he said. “The presentation clearly demonstrated Entergy’s effort to serve our community better, and reactions to storms such as Gustav, Ike, and Isaac proved that their efforts were very meaningful. Finally, the presentation also made me think about what I can do later to serve my community as a prospect in the power industry.”

��and drill annually to prepare for all types of weather events.

This has helped Entergy better respond to other major storms in recent years, including hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Isaac, Dawsey said.

“Every major storm we’ve had since Katrina and Rita, we’ve gotten a little bit better. That’s our expectation — to get better every time,” he said. “We use a lot of tools. One is rebuilding to a higher storm-hardened standard, but another is our storm response plan.”