Some residences and businesses in Morgan City still are without power today, but officials hope to change that by tomorrow.
As of about 4 p.m., roughly 90 percent of the city's electric customers were back on the grid, said Mayor Frank "Boo" Grizzaffi.
"We're trying to get as many on as we can by tonight," Grizzaffi said. "I hope we don't run out of time."
The city has its own electric system. The power went out before Barry even reached the shore, and that meant repairs were "dead in the water" until the winds calmed down, Grizzaffi said.
Utility workers can't climb poles or work on lines unless the winds are less than 30 miles an hour; for the first 24 hours after the outage the winds never dropped below 40 mph, he said.
Once the winds died down, crews started work, and have been working since then to restore power.
As of Monday, about 100 homes still didn't have power, the mayor said. There are also several large businesses in the dark, he said. The crews are working on the homes first, but still hope to have all power restored by noon tomorrow.
Grizzaffi said the city had no water issues at all from Barry.
"We've started our clean-up plan, and instead of hiring an out of town company, we decided to go with community pick-up," Grizzaffi said. "The city's involved and neighbors have volunteered and we're making quick work of it."
It was the sustained winds that caused the power problems, and then aggravated them by blocking repairs, he said.
"We dodged what we thought we were going to get, and got what we didn't expect," he said. "It wasn't killer wind, it just lasted so long."
