After dealing with additional outages and a substation failure on Saturday, Entergy Arkansas Inc. crews by Sunday afternoon had resolved most of the service disruptions that started in Garland County Friday afternoon following a series of strong thunderstorms.
Entergy was only reporting four outages in Garland County by 5:30 p.m. Sunday, down from about 900 customers without power in the county as of 7 a.m. Sunday.
About 90 of the 900 customers were located in Hot Springs, said Jim Garland, Entergy's regional customer service manager.
The remainder of the large outage cases Sunday morning were located along Highway 298 west of Hot Springs Village toward Fannie, Garland said.
There were also a few scattered outages along Highway 7 north of Highway 5 toward Hot Springs Village.
"Our crews continue to work as quickly and as safely as possible to restore power," Garland said as the work progressed. Entergy had estimated that the majority of those customers would have their power restored by noon Sunday.
Garland said Saturday morning that the severe thunderstorms that moved through the Hot Springs and western Garland County area Friday afternoon left around 7,000 customers without service at the storm's peak.
By 11 p.m. Friday, local lineman had restored power to almost 3,500 customers, and by 7 a.m. Saturday, the number of outages had been reduced to about 2,400.
The number of outages actually climbed during the day Saturday, however. By 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Entergy still had about 2,800 customers out of power in the Garland County area, which included some new outages that occurred Saturday due to additional storm damage and the outage at the Mountain Valley Substation near Hot Springs Village, which impacted about 1,400 customers.
Garland said the restoration work on Saturday was "slowed somewhat" by additional outages caused by storms in the area and rough terrain in some of the outage areas.
Entergy Arkansas Inc. brought an additional 100 outside line workers to Garland County to restore power after the bout of severe weather.
The National Weather Service posted on its website Saturday a ridge of high pressure that was building toward Arkansas on Friday promised heat and not much rain, but before the ridge became dominant, the atmosphere destabilized in northern and western sections of the state during the afternoon.
"Hit and miss" thunderstorms popped up quickly, mainly north and west of Little Rock, producing damaging straight-line winds of 60-plus mph that downed trees a few miles south-southeast of Washita in Montgomery County, at Caddo Gap in Montgomery County, Tulip in Dallas County, and just south of Mountain Pine.
Local on 06/11/2018