On Friday, the 12th of August a storm blew through our meager homes on Sixth street here in Hot Springs, and at 9pm many homes lost power. First information from Entergy that evening was that the power would be restored at 2am on Saturday morning. We were still out of power in the morning and were told that it would be restored at 10pm Saturday
evening. Workmen came out at about 3pm on and informed us that it would be "just a little bet later" due to a bad transformer. When we called at midnight on Saturday night, we were informed that there were other areas that had to be repaired first, even though I had reported that my wife required a breathing machine and we had been without power for 27 hours.
Finally a crew from Texas came out on Sunday and replaced the transformer and restored our power. We were without power for almost 48hours in this heatwave. The crew noticed that the transformer had just been replaced months earlier and shared with us that the reason it keeps going out is because it is connected to too many homes. Sixth street is not an affluent neighborhood and seems to be less important that other areas. Due my wife's disabilities, I was unable to leave her and missed two full days of work. While we on Sixth Street understand there will be acts of God and there will be outages occasionaly, this was an infrastructure problem. All of us lost food due to no refrigeration and 95 degree heat, and I'm sure that some children went without.
I realize that one might read this and say it was just an isolated incident, so let me tell you a similar story. Six weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon at 1pm, half of the electricity in my home went out. My phone doesn't work without electricity and I borrowed a cell phone and reported my problem to Entergy. When ask for a call back number, I explained that I do not have a cell phone and my phone will not work. The customer service rep said he would sent someone out and he understood about the phone not working. I got no service Saturday, Sunday, Monday and on Tuesday I called a private engineer, thinking the issue must be in my home. I paid that person $20 to tell me that
the problem was Entergys. After calling Entergy, that customer service rep told me that they attempted to call me last Saturday to tell me "THERE WERE NO OUTAGES IN MY AREA ON SATURDAY." I got power back that day when Entergy came out and repaired the problem at the pole.
I've lost two days of work, $100 plus in groceries, and had to rearrange my entire home when I had the partial outage, yet Entergy has not made a single gesture to compensate or even apologize. I truly feel, as do most of the families on this street, that we are second class citizens and are not as important as other citizens in Hot Springs. Furthermore, Entergy cannot even staff an office here so that we talk face to face with them on issues, leaving its customers at the mercy of their awful automated 800 number phone tree.
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