Three years after Hurricane Katrina caused massive damage on the Gulf Coast, the same utilities were facing at least 500,000 power outages as Hurricane Gustav came ashore today.

Nearly all of the outages were in Louisiana with smaller numbers of customers losing power in the states east of Louisiana, according to an Associated Press report. The storm was expected to push west toward Texas, where the wind was beginning to accelerate.

About 500,000 of Entergy's 1.2 million customers in Louisiana have lost power, and the number continues to grow.

"It's not as strong as originally projected and that's good news," said Mike Burns, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. "But we are experiencing extremely significant damage in areas."

Cleco Corp., which has 273,000 customers in the state, said the number of customers without power was at 50,000 and growing.

Mississippi Power reported about 8,000 customers were without power and Southern Co. in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle reported outages totaling about 8,000.

"I think rebuilding and strengthening our distribution and transmission system over the past two seasons since Katrina hopefully has aided in minimizing the impact of Gustav," Mississippi Power spokeswoman Cindy Duvall said in an e-mail to the AP.