Slidell residents are concerned after silence from Cleco power outage
A sudden power outage Tuesday morning left thousands of people in Slidell without power. Cleco customers demand answers for hours-long outage.
A sudden power outage Tuesday morning left thousands of people in Slidell without power. Cleco customers demand answers for hours-long outage.
A sudden power outage Tuesday morning left thousands of people in Slidell without power. Cleco customers demand answers for hours-long outage.
Once-loyal customers are sounding the alarm.
Eric Jones is a Slidell resident and CLECO customer. "Not only do we have elderly neighbors across here, my parents are actually living here with me as well," he said. "My mom is on oxygen."
Jones lives in the Audubon neighborhood, one of dozens of subdivisions affected by Tuesday's outage.
He said, "Luckily, it happened at night, not during the day when I'm working from home, which would definitely be a problem."
Tuesday afternoon, CLECO told WDSU they were still investigating the cause, hours later.
"It was really unexpected," Daniel Suezenneau said.
Seuzeneau is with the Slidell Police Department. He said they work closely with fire rescue in times like these to make vulnerable members of the community a priority when lights go out.
"A lot of those homes are actually documented," Seuzeneau said. "So we know ahead of time that we have an extended power outage in this area. Those are the people we need to go to first. Usually when you have planned power outages for storms, that's when the looters come out. But even so, we had extra officers on patrol last night."
Jones said he wants to know why Cleco has not alerted their customers with an explanation and if more outages could come.
"You know, things are going to happen," he said. "But having that like, hey, this is what happened. It's what we're doing to remedy the solution. You know, this is what causes what we're going to do to avoid it in the future. Things like that. That's really important information to have."