An early morning wreck and scattered weather-related damage collectively left around 500 Entergy Arkansas Inc. customers without service on Tuesday.
The scattered, weather-related outages around Hot Springs and Garland County Tuesday morning were due to wind damage to electrical facilities, the utility said.
With wind gusts of up to 30 mph in Tuesday's forecast and the ground saturated with several inches of rain, Garland County Director of Emergency Management Bo Robertson had said Monday that the county was bracing for downed trees on roadways and utility lines.
"With the recent rains, the ground is saturated and the wind this morning caused several downed trees that struck power lines and broke at least two poles in the area," Jim Garland, Entergy's regional customer service manager, said in an email on Tuesday.
A weather-related outage along Brady Mountain Road caused about 400 customers in the area to lose power, Garland said. He estimated that the outage in that area would be resolved by 4 p.m. Tuesday.
Entergy crews were also still working an outage near Ledgerwood Circle Tuesday afternoon. The outage near Ledgerwood impacted about 10 customers, and Garland said power was expected to be restored by 3 p.m. Tuesday.
"Entergy appreciates our customer's patience during the restoration work and we ask for the public to stay away from downed power lines as they should be considered energized and dangerous," he said.
Another outage that occurred around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday was the result of a truck that struck a utility pole in the 7700 block of Airport Road (Highway 70 west) near Bonnerdale.
"This outage impacted about 90 customers and power was restored around 10 a.m.," Garland said.
Local on 02/13/2019