The CEO Forum: The Ultimate CEOs: J. Wayne Leonard

Deck: 

CEO, Entergy

Fortnightly Magazine - June 2006
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Fortnightly: Why were last year’s hurricanes so destructive to Entergy’s infrastructure?

Leonard: As you know, Hurricane Katrina was one of the biggest natural catastrophes this country has ever seen in terms of dollars. In our case, Katrina was the biggest natural catastrophe. And Rita was the second biggest, coming right behind it. Katrina hit the vulnerable spot in New Orleans, with the flooding. Rita hit the vulnerable spot with the transmission into Southwestern Louisiana and Southeastern Texas, where you are dead-ended into the Gulf and you’re dead-ended into ERCOT because you are not interconnected there. Then you have a lot of swamp and wetlands and other things where you really have difficulty building anything, whether it’s generating plant or transmission. Rita just separated the generation from the load. It then cut diagonally across our territory. So it got almost every one of our jurisdictions. You couldn’t have had a worse scenario than the way those two hurricanes played out.

Fortnightly: How has this experience changed the type of infrastructure choices you will be making?

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