BATON ROUGE - Monday afternoon's thunderstorm left 23,000 Entergy customers in East Baton Rouge Parish in the dark. 

Monday evening, Entergy's outage map said 23,345 customers were out of power. Nearly 15,000 of those outages were concentrated between the Broadmoor, Sherwood Forest, and Inniswold neighborhoods. 

As of around 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, about 4,400 households were without power. Entergy says it expects power to be restored to most customers by late Tuesday, however, major damage to infrastructure along S. Choctaw Drive could keep about a dozen customers without power until sometime Friday. 

Entergy officials said that four transmission structures were damaged in the storm when a roof flew off a building on South Choctaw onto train tracks. 

Mayor Sharon Weston Broome said residents should call 211 if they are in need of emergency assistance or additional resources. 

Entergy provided the following update regarding the outages Tuesday afternoon:

Good afternoon all, our utility crews have been out in full force today after yesterday’s storm brought lightning and straight-line winds and downed trees and other debris across the Greater Baton Rouge area. Additional crews from other parts of the state were called in and have been supporting local crews on the ground and, of course, in the air with overhead equipment.

 As of 1:30 p.m., we’ve been able to restore power to approximately 18,600 customers; approximately 4,400 of the 23,000 Baton Rouge area storm-affected customers that were without power at 6 p.m. yesterday remain without service — an 80% decrease in total outages.

 We still anticipate being able to restore electric service to most customers who can safely receive it by late tonight. We are working towards refining estimated times of restoration as reports from the field continue to be provided to local networks and our operations center and will continue to keep our customers updated along the way.  

 In some areas, crews have had to cut trees and limbs away from damaged electric equipment before repairs could be made or new poles and wire could be installed. And in some neighborhoods, this is taking place in hard-to-access locations in the backyards of homes.

As of 1 p.m., crews had completed more than 60% of the damage assessments in the Baton Rouge area, finding the following as damaged and in need of repair or replacement:

• Five transmission structures
• 10 distribution poles
• 14 distribution crossarms
• 5 distribution transformers
• 14 spans of distribution wire (a span being the distance from pole to pole)

In addition, 12 commercial customers will remain without power until the transmission structures along S. Choctaw Drive that were damaged by a combination of straight-line winds and debris can be replaced and energized. Transmission line repairs typically require more time than distribution line repairs due to the size of transmission structures and the specialized equipment required to set new structures. Our customer service team is working directly with these customers to keep them informed of our progress so that they can plan accordingly. We anticipate that service will be restored to these 12 customers by sometime Friday.

 As always, our crews will continue working in a methodical way to restore power quickly and safely to all customers. For the latest, please follow us on social media at @EntergyLA and check our View Outages map. Attached are photographs of restoration work that has taken place today. Feel free to use them online or with your broadcasts.