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Entergy New Orleans volunteers help New Orleans residents "beat the heat" Entergy New Orleans partnered with Rebuilding Together New Orleans to help residents stay safe and cool during the summer months through a series of home weatherization events. Through three volunteer "Beat the Heat" events, Entergy volunteers helped weatherize two homes in District C and one home in District B. Volunteers helped improve the homes by caulking windows and doors and installing Hardie board siding. These improvements help reduce energy consumption and lower monthly electricity costs while making homes more comfortable during periods of extreme heat. "Helping residents stay safe and comfortable in their homes is an important part of serving our community," said Stephanie Willis, director of public affairs at Entergy New Orleans. "Through our partnership with Rebuilding Together New Orleans, we can provide valuable support for families while helping them manage energy costs during the hot summer months." Rebuilding Together New Orleans works to advance health equity by addressing the connection between housing and health in underserved communities. Through home repairs and revitalization efforts, the organization helps promote long-term neighborhood stability and improve quality of life. At Entergy New Orleans, Csr Company believe every person deserves a safe and healthy home. Through partnership s and volunteer service, Csr Company is helping create safer, stronger communities across its city. View original content here.

PreventionFirst in Practice: Major event preparedness for storms and wildfires. This is a recap of a session from AiDASH Evolve 2026. Speakers. * Justin Winters, Sr. Incident Response Specialist, Entergy * Mason Withers, Director - Risk Mitigation, Wildfire Mitigation Practice, AiDASH * Randy Lyle, Sr. Director, Wildfire Mitigation Practice, AiDASH * Moderated by Shashank Shekhar, Managing Director and Partner, BCG Summary. * Effective major event preparedness is not built in the weeks before a storm or wildfire season - it is built year-round, through training, planning cycles, lessons learned programs, and operational protocols that are practiced long before they are needed. * The difference between a utility that is prepared and one that is scrambling when an event arrives comes down to one thing: whether a plan exists and whether people have practiced executing it. * Regulators and insurers are raising the bar on what preparedness looks like - requiring utilities to demonstrate not just that they have a plan, but that they made the right decisions when conditions warranted action. At AiDASH Evolve 2026, three practitioners who have lived through some of the most consequential storms and wildfires in recent history shared what major event preparedness looks like - before the event, at 72 hours out, and in the lessons that follow. Justin Winters of Entergy brought the storm perspective, shaped by Hurricane Harvey and years of building Entergy's incident response framework across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Randy Lyle and Mason Withers of AiDASH's Wildfire Mitigation Practice brought the wildfire perspective, drawn from the Cedar Fire, SDG&E's 2007 fires, and decades of building programs across the country. The session was moderated by Shashank Shekhar, Managing Director and Partner at BCG, who framed the conversation around three acts: what utilities do years in advance, what happens in the 72 hours before an event, and what practitioners would leave the room with as their most actionable counsel. Justin Winters, Sr. Incident Response Specialist at Entergy, speaking at AiDASH Evolve 2026 Justin Winters, Entergy: Building storm readiness before the season starts. Preparedness is not a pre-season activity - it is year-round, and it goes in a cycle with lessons learned. Justin Winters joined Entergy two weeks before Hurricane Harvey made landfall. Harvey hit multiple times, bouncing up and down the coast, and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage. It was his defining event - and the lens through which Entergy's entire preparedness philosophy has since been shaped. The framework Entergy built is called the five Rs: Ready, React, Respond, Recover, and Review. Every phase has its own processes, documents, and training requirements. "Each year we've learned that prevention and preparing is not just right before an event - it's all year round. And it goes in a cycle with lessons learned." Training is the foundation. Entergy travels to each of its states to run exercises - not just for tropical storms, but for every category of event the system might face: winter storms, earthquakes, major thunderstorms. Every incident commander, branch director, and section lead is trained in ICS 100 and 300, the FEMA Incident Command Structure that Entergy models its storm response after. "We make sure that not only do they have the criteria to exercise on, but they are exercising properly." Hardening decisions follow directly from past event data. After each storm season, Entergy reviews where the hardest-hit areas were, scores events by risk, and prioritizes capital projects accordingly. Supply chain readiness is part of the same cycle - materials distributed strategically across all four states so that when a storm tracks north into Louisiana rather than hitting the coast, the materials are already close. "We make sure they're spaced out strategically so that we are able to respond appropriately." At 72 hours, Entergy moves from its Ready phase into React. The decisions made in that window - how many levels of system command to stand up, where to stage crews, how to position resources - determine how the response unfolds after landfall. Winters described it directly when asked what 72 hours out feels like. "We are in our React Phase." Although it can feel like chaos because of the amount of things going on at one time, there's a structure behind it. Entergy operates four levels of system command activation, depending on the scale of the event. Crews are either staged close and moved in immediately after the storm passes or held further out - a decision that depends on the damage prediction model Entergy built in partnership with INL. "That's my primary storm role - the damage prediction. We can start it 96 hours out if we wanted to. The whole purpose of getting the damage prediction started is so resource and logistics can go ahead and start seeing what they need to acquire." The model becomes more accurate the closer the storm gets to landfall, as the track tightens. In parallel, Entergy's logistics team locks down staging sites and lodging across all four states. A contracted weather service provider delivers custom forecasts multiple times a day, with calls in the morning and evening for leadership to ask questions and pressure-test assumptions. "The closer we get to landfall, the more accurate we think the damage prediction is going to get, because the storm's going to stop wobbling back and forth a little bit as it hits, so we can start pinpointing." Randy Lyle, Senior Director, Wildfire Mitigation Practice at AiDASH shares insights during the panel discussion at AiDASH Evolve 2026 Randy Lyle, AiDASH: The difference between execution and chaos. In 2026, there is really no reason not to have a good, well-thought-out and well-practiced protocol for when those kinds of events are coming. Randy Lyle, entering his 52nd fire season, drew a clear contrast between a utility with a protocol in place and one without. With a plan, an approaching event is an execution problem. Without one, it is confusion. "It's people acting as anticipated and expected versus just mass confusion and people not knowing what's going on, what they're supposed to do, what's expected of them." His counsel on building toward that: start with situational awareness, understand the difference between a bad day and a catastrophic day, and set operational thresholds accordingly. Wind, he said, is the single most important variable for utilities navigating wildfire risk. "Even if you can't do it perfectly now, get a start so you can begin to learn and build on that, and improve as time goes by." When Shashank asked him to contrast a utility with a solid protocol against one that is scrambling, Lyle was direct about what separates the two. The ecosystem, he noted, has been at this for almost 20 years. The information and lessons learned are out there. Even an imperfect start builds toward something - year over year, the patterns emerge and the protocols sharpen. His closing line to the room: know when the bad days are, know where the bad areas are - "don't do stupid stuff on bad days." Listening, learning, and exchanging perspectives - Mason Withers, Director of Risk Mitigation at AiDASH, during a panel at AiDASH Evolve 2026. Mason Withers, AiDASH: what regulators expect utilities to know. "Situational awareness is not just what is the weather doing. It is whether the fires are going on, are they encroaching into your service territory?" Mason Withers spent 15 years at SDG&E helping build the wildfire program there. The fires of 2007 - which burned over 2,000 homes - came down to a single failure: the senior VP of operations did not know what the weather was doing. Withers heard the same words from a leader at a different utility 10 years later. "You guys need to know what the weather is so you can make good decisions so we can avoid those types of things." Regulators have since made situational awareness a formal expectation. In Texas, utilities are required to demonstrate a plan for responding to wildfire events encroaching on their service territory - not just weather monitoring, but fire monitoring. The expectations from regulators, Withers said, reflect what the general public already expects. The two are moving in the same direction. The event doesn't wait. All three practitioners closed with the same underlying message, stated differently. Lyle: know the bad days and the bad areas. Withers: have situational awareness and act on it. Winters: stand up early, capture what you learn, and acknowledge the gaps. On that last point, Winters' final counsel to the room was the hardest to systematize - and the most important. "Don't be afraid to point out your gaps that you have. You have to acknowledge the fact that you've got gaps and you didn't do everything perfect, because nobody's perfect out there. But to not acknowledge your gaps in everything is more dangerous than anything else." The through-line, as Shashank Shekhar noted at the close, is PreventionFirst. The event does not wait for the utility to get ready. Preparedness - whether for a storm tracking toward the Gulf Coast or a wildfire approaching a service territory - is built long before the threat is on the horizon. Find out what a PreventionFirst(TM) approach looks like for your grid. Ready to stop reacting and start preventing? Get a demo today.

Entergy New Orleans supports students and families through back-to-school events. As students across New Orleans returned to the classroom, Entergy New Orleans supported students and families by participating in back-to-school events in all five City Council districts. Entergy Corporation partnered with community organizations and elected officials to help students prepare for the new school year. "Back-to-school season gives us an opportunity to connect with students and families and invest in the communities we serve," said Stephanie Willis, director of public affairs at Entergy New Orleans. "Our participation in these events reflects our commitment to supporting students, strengthening communities, and creating opportunities for the next generation." In District A, Entergy Corporation participated in the IMPACT 504 Closing Program and Back to School Giveaway and joined Councilmember Lesli Harris for the Housing Resource Fair and Back to School Giveaway in District B. In District C, its linemen participated in Alice Hart Charter School's "Touch a Truck!" event, greeting students as they arrived on their first day of school. Students had the opportunity to explore its bucket trucks, learn about lineworkers and gain a better understanding of Entergy Corporation help keep the community powered. In District D, Entergy Corporation participated in the Belden Batiste School Supply Giveaway at Hunters Field, helping provide students with essential supplies for the school year. In District E, Entergy Corporation participated in Councilmember Jason Hughes' Back to School Student Resource Giveaway, where students participated in games and activities with Officer Friendly. These back-to-school events provided an opportunity for Entergy Corporation to connect students and families and strengthen partnerships in the communities Entergy Corporation serve. Entergy New Orleans is committed to supporting its students and creating opportunities that help build a stronger future for New Orleans.