Receives EEI Awards for Responding to Gustav, Ike and Assisting Two Other Utilities

New Orleans, La. – Entergy Corporation accepted two national awards Wednesday for its work restoring power after hurricanes Gustav and Ike and for helping two utilities recover from severe weather. It is the 11th consecutive year Entergy has received storm response awards from the Edison Electric Institute.

Entergy received an EEI Emergency Recovery Award for restoring power to more than 1.6 million customers following Gustav and Ike, which struck less than two weeks apart in September 2008. It also received EEI’s Emergency Assistance Award for helping Public Service of Oklahoma following a December 2007 ice storm and AEP Texas after Hurricane Dolly in July 2008.

Entergy is the only company to be honored every year since the EEI Emergency Response Awards were first presented in 1998. Entergy has now won four awards for its efforts restoring power to its own customers and nine awards for assisting other utilities repair their systems.

“It’s a tremendous honor to receive awards 11 years in a row. I think it shows our employees are known throughout the industry for their outstanding preparation and dedication to getting the job done safely and quickly,” said Randy Helmick, Entergy’s “storm boss” and vice president of transmission. “Their focus on safety allowed us to rebuild significant sections of our system within 24 days after Gustav and Ike and work a total of 8.7 million man-hours while setting the best safety record in our company’s history.”

Gustav made landfall Sept. 1, 2008, and knocked out power to customers in three of the four states served by Entergy utilities. It hit Louisiana hard, leaving 71 percent of customers without power. Ike struck the Texas coast on Sept. 13, 2008, leaving 99 percent of Entergy Texas, Inc. customers without power.

“We faced significant technical and physical challenges in both storms, but we were able to restore power to everyone who could take it by Sept. 25,” Helmick said. “It was a huge job that had damage spread across 67,000 square miles of our service territory. We had to replace or repair nearly 85,000 miles of distribution lines and roughly 6,000 miles of transmission lines.”

Helmick added, “These two storms capped one of our busiest years ever for responding to severe weather – from a horrific series of tornadoes to back-to-back hurricanes. For Gustav, we assembled a workforce of approximately 15,000. Ike struck as work was starting to wind down in some of the less-damaged areas hit by Gustav. We were able to shift a good number of those workers to help repair damage from Ike. In total, 12,000 employees and contractors responded to Ike.”
Entergy also received an EEI Emergency Assistance Award for sending crews to help Public Service of Oklahoma respond to an ice storm that hit the Tulsa area in December 2007 and AEP-Texas recover from Hurricane Dolly.

“It’s part of our industry’s culture to respond when someone is in need. We receive the benefits of this mutual utility company assistance when our region is hit by major storms, so it’s only right that we respond in kind and help our neighboring utilities get the lights on as quickly as possible,” Helmick said.

EEI President Thomas R. Kuhn said, “Entergy’s system had significant damage from the back-to-back hurricanes, with direct hits upon each landfall, yet the company as usual fought hard to get customers’ power back on through all of that adversity. Entergy proved its helpfulness to other utilities as well – again, an Entergy tradition. Year in and year out, the company has provided one great example of the determination electric utilities have after natural disasters.”

Entergy Corporation is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear generator in the United States. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $13 billion and approximately 14,300 employees.

-30-
entergy.com