Power outage an omen, official says

Late Tuesday afternoon, as temperatures climbed to 95 degrees, power surged and then ebbed at homes in Gentilly and around Esplanade Avenue. And then finally, about 4 p.m., it went out. For more than four hours, 7,000 to 10,000 customers sweated it out on their stoops as Entergy worked to restore power after shutting it off for safety reasons.

The outage, and others in recent weeks, underscore the system's fragility after Hurricane Katrina, officials said. Repairs made after the storm to get power restored are considered temporary. The system no longer has back-up redundancy, and won't until millions of dollars are spent to repair the system, officials said.

from the Times Picayune