The largest outages were reported in Mobile.
Thousands remained in the dark Wednesday morning (Sept. 5) after Tropical Depression Gordon knocked out power on its way through Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. The biggest outages were reported in Mobile, Ala., with almost 21,000 customers without electricity.
Gordon made landfall as a tropical storm Tuesday night in Mississippi near Pascagoula, which is just west of the Mississippi-Alabama state line. By 7 a.m. Wednesday, the storm had weakened to a depression.
Gordon claimed one life when a tree fell on a mobile home Tuesday night in Pensacola, trapping and killing a child .
Tuesday night, more than 27,000 customers were without power, mostly in coastal Alabama and the western tip of the Florida Panhandle around Pensacola, with a few hundred in southeastern Mississippi.
Rain was still falling but the lights were on Wednesday morning at a Waffle House in Mobile, where factory worker Jerome Richardson said he lost power at 9 p.m. Tuesday as the storm passed overhead. He was still without electricity as he left for his 12-hour work shift.
„I just hope I don’t have to throw out everything in my refrigerator when I get home,“ he said.
In Louisiana, Entergy before the storm said it had 1,000 workers available to restore power outages. It closed its customer centers Tuesday ahead of the Gordon. On Wednesday, with the storm no longer a threat to New Orleans, Entergy said it was reopening its customer service facilities on the east and west banks.
UPDATE: Now that #TropicalStormGordon has passed our area and is moving NW, @EntergyNOLA ’s two care centers at 3400 Canal St. (East Bank) and 4021-J Behrman Hwy. (Algiers) will reopen at 8 AM today (9/5) for normal business hours. #SafetyFirst
Here are the major outages as of 8 a.m. Wednesday:
Alabama: 21,000
7am Wednesday update:
Bands of rain from Tropical Storm Gordon continue to sweep through the Mobile area, where 21,000 customers are without power. Our crews are in position and are already working in places where it is safe to do so.
Florida: 5,100
About 5,100 Gulf Power customers are without power, mainly in the Pensacola area. The outage includes Perdido Key, Navarre and Santa Rosa Island.
Mississippi: 1,000
About 770 Entergy customers are without power, mainly in the Jackson metro area. See more.
About 220 Mississippi Power customers were without power throughout the state. See more.
Louisiana: 300
About 300 Entergy customers are without power, including 40 in Orleans Parish. The biggest outage, affecting 211 customers, is in East Baton Rouge Parish. See more.
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The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Carlie Kollath Wells is a morning reporter at NOLA.com| The Times-Picayune. Have an early-bird tip? Send it to her: cwells@nola.com or Twitter @carlie_kollath .
