Temporary emergency grid protection outages in Bossier Parish -SWEPCO

The outages are primarily affecting customers in Bossier Parish, according to SWEPCO. There were more than 30,000 SWEPCO customers in Bossier and Caddo Parishes who did not have power.

On Saturday, April 26, around 4:30 p.m., SWEPCO said they were notified by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) of a grid protection event that may cause disruption within the SWEPCO service area. Bossier Parish will see outages until SPP directs SWEPCO to restore power.

SWPECO released the following statement regarding the outage:

Temporary emergency grid protection outages are now in effect across parts of our service territory in Bossier Parish.

The SWEPCO team works with the Southwest Power Pool to manage the flow of electricity in our area. SPP required us to take emergency outages in specific areas on the power lines that provide our customers with service. This action was taken to prevent conditions that could cause widespread damage to power lines and equipment that could take days or longer to fix. We are working and coordinating with SPP and will provide additional updates as soon as possible.

The outages are primarily affecting customers in Northwest Louisiana, primarily among Bossier and Caddo parishes. Please know we always strive to provide our customers with advance notice of an outage whenever possible, and unfortunately that was not possible in this emergency situation. In this instance, our grid operators were instructed to take immediate action, which did not give us time to inform you before the outage occurred.

At 9 p.m., SWPECO gave another update stating they were in the process of restoring power to customers throughout the hour. They said they expect all outages to be resolved Saturday night. By 9:13 p.m., there were 8,747 SWEPCO customers still waiting to have their power restored.

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