In my 32 years of experience, I have never seen as much damage to an electrical system as I saw when Synergetic Design's storm assessment team entered the Lake Charles, Louisiana, U.S., area in September 2005.

Hurricane Rita had moved north after devastating western areas of Louisiana and eastern parts of Texas with Category 3 hurricane force. Several hours of 115-mph winds and major flooding had caused severe and widespread damage to utility infrastructure.

As the storm approached, Darrell McCardle, Entergy's damage-assessment coordinator, remembered Entergy's spring exercises to prepare for this moment. In the exercise, the scenario was that there had been a direct hit on New Orleans by a Category 4 hurricane. But McCardle never imagined that in the late summer, just months later, that scenario would actually be played out, followed by another major hurricane just a few weeks later.

As Category 5 Rita approached, McCardle recalled thinking, “This can't really be happening. Surely this storm will decrease in intensity like many others.” When it was clear Rita would be a direct hit, McCardle had “a real sinking feeling.”

On Thursday, Sept. 22, in the hours immediately following Rita, McCardle called Synergetic Design and asked Larry Burgess, the company's storm relief coordinator, to send 25 two-person specialized storm damage-assessment teams to Louisiana. A few weeks earlier, Synergetic Design had sent 25 teams to assist Florida Power & Light when Hurricane Katrina swept across southern Florida, as well as 15 teams to help Entergy in response to Katrina in eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi.

“Before Katrina, we had never gone outside for scouting,” McCardle said. “We had relied on outside work for line crews before, but scouting is different from line crews. It's a real gamble because typically you want scouts ready to go as soon as the wind goes down. We were already working with Synergetic Design and were not uncomfortable with calling them.”

From Synergetic Design's corporate headquarters in Fort Mill, South Carolina, U.S., Burgess began mobilizing the 25 teams. Team members started arriving at the Atlanta airport from across the United States on Friday, Sept. 23. Once there, we divided the main team into smaller groups and set up individuals as sub-team leads. We knew it would be much easier to travel a long distance in smaller groups.

We traveled about halfway to Louisiana that Friday afternoon. That evening, we stocked up on supplies for the final leg of the journey. The next morning, we left around daylight bound for the state capital, Baton Rouge. We encountered bad weather along the way, but traveling in small groups proved beneficial. The leading group communicated fuel and food locations to the other four sub-team leaders, and on the way to the spots, each team purchased enough food and water to last several days.

After arriving in Baton Rouge — our home base until receiving final instructions — we had a chance to meet and greet one another. As a group, we reviewed basic safety issues. All of the assessors were experienced utility personnel and had worked severe storms before. We exchanged tips and discussed issues such as personal safety, teamwork and safe driving. We talked about assumptions for safe fieldwork, such as treating all wires as energized, staying a safe distance from down spans if outside a vehicle and treating all traffic signals as four-way stops.

It was important to mentally prepare the team for the task ahead. We knew this would be no walk in the park, and we would encounter adverse conditions the entire time. We had been told to expect dangerous living conditions. There was a real possibility we would be spending nights in tents and possibly in nothing more than sleeping bags on the ground after 13- to 15-hour workdays. Sanitary conditions would be bad to nonexistent, so we encouraged frequent and extensive use of hand sanitizers. We also had to assume there would be no electrical service available.

Finally, I wanted to reinforce Synergetic Design's philosophy. We tell all our teams, as well as our clients, that we are in charge of failure and they own success. Meanwhile, McCardle, stationed at Entergy's Command Center in Jackson, Mississippi, U.S., was working 16-hour days to coordinate response. “It was enough to make me want to retire,” he joked.

That evening, we received instructions to leave for Lake Charles the next morning.

When we arrived at the Lake Charles office around 11 a.m. on Sunday, the local authorities had already blocked off much of the town. It was like a scene in a movie where the people had vanished into thin air. No traffic and no noise other than nonhuman sounds. It was nearly motionless. You could sense that something terrible had just happened, but you could not see the true extent of the damage.

Having worked many storms, we knew that the first stage after any storm hits can be best described as chaos and confusion. Those who can manage through this first stage get their power restored the quickest.

It was obvious that Entergy personnel put tremendous effort into storm preparation. They were very well organized and gave us maps to start our initial damage-assessment process. There was no delay in receiving our safety briefing, understanding what information they expected us to provide and where we needed to start the process. Entergy communicated the reporting hierarchy early and clearly.

Two key players in Entergy's planning were Distribution Design Engineer Landon Duhon and Engineering Assistant Gary Fontenot. Days before Rita hit, Duhon and Fontenot were preparing for her. After Rita turned course from Corpus Christi, Texas, U.S., toward Galveston, Texas, Duhon “knew we needed to get serious.” They prepared a small list of materials for scouts, including maps and the areas scouts would cover in different scenarios.

Even as Rita closed in, Duhon and Fontenot were uncertain if they would receive orders to stay or evacuate. When Rita hit, Fontenot was stationed 60 miles (97 km) from the eye, and Duhon was 90 miles (145 km) out.

We always conduct daily morning meetings to go over the day's schedule during storm duty. We open with a prayer to ask for protection for all those laboring to get the lights on, as well as people whose lives have been placed into chaos and confusion. We go over daily expectations and have a safety briefing to discuss concerns and a topic for that day. It is one of our first objectives to get the team into a routine so they can concentrate on their task ahead.

Our teams spent a week examining distribution lines in the town of Sulphur, Louisiana, and worked west toward the Texas border. During this time, we assessed nearly 850 miles (1368 km) of distribution line and found nearly 25% of the electrical system damaged including transmission, primary, secondary and services. One feeder had more than 500 spans of primary down, equating to almost 24 miles (39 km) of line, requiring repair or replacement.

The damage to Sulphur's line and service area was as follows:

• Primary down — 4875 spans
• Poles damaged — 2075
• Transformers damaged — 488
• Crossarms damaged — 1721.