Group President of Utility Operations, Entergy Corp
Powering life – literally! | Rod West | TEDxNewOrleans
What it takes to power-up a city that is ripped apart by water destruction and left with an unknown future.
Rod West was named Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer for Entergy Corporation in 2010.
West was uniquely involved in the rebuilding of Entergy New Orleans, Inc. In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck and flooded 80% of the city, West was serving as Director of the metro region with responsibility of the city’s electric infrastructure. After ensuring the safety of his workforce, many of whom lost homes to the storm, West and his team went to work overseeing a $6...
About Roderick West
At the 2023 EEI conference in Austin, Texas, Rod West interviewed Deion Sanders, whom he described as "the man who defined the idea of the 'shutdown corner.'" West noted that he and Sanders were born 11 months apart, calling Sanders his "elder." He asked Sanders about the origins of his "Prime" persona and how the advent of NIL and the transfer portal has changed his approach to recruiting and roster building. West remarked that the business of sports has shifted, with college athletics "trying to figure out, among the haves and have‑nots, how future revenues of collegiate athletics get divided." In a 2015 TEDx talk, West recounted his experience leading Entergy's response to Hurricane Katrina, which he described as "our own version of Lord Voldemort." He recalled hearing that water was "gushing down Canal Street" and the decision to evacuate employees. West stated that Entergy's decision to return to New Orleans "sent a signal to the investment community" and that the company's leadership asked employees what they wanted to do, receiving a "resounding yes" to rebuild. He concluded that the company is "not simply in the business of powering an electric grid or a gas system" but is "together powering life."
Transcript (15 segments)
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Roderick West0:13
Good morning everyone. Author JK Rowling's penned the famous Harry Potter books. There was a character by the name of Lord Voldemort, whose name evoked such fear and dread that he was only referred to in hushed tones as 'He Who Shall Not Be Named.' On August 29, 2005, we were introduced to our own version of Lord Voldemort. There was no fictional character. It was ... that I knew that this was no normal storm. The path of the storm moved from an eastward northeaster direction; it had now beelined toward the mouth of the Mississippi. The next morning, the crews who were embedded in New Orleans with us at the Hyatt Hotel — we sent them out to the street in large trucks to get a first-hand view of just how damaged the system was. I'm sitting on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Hotel in our command center, and I hear the following coming across the radio. He said, 'Mr. West.'
This is a shot from the power plant — the Ameesha power plant in New Orleans East — and it's the only power plant that's functioning that still headquartered in New Orleans. At toll you see to the left of the picture, it's about 60 feet tall. This is the storm coming in to make landfall. What you don't see at the bottom of that picture is about a 12-foot fence that the storm surge totally took out. This was a devastating moment. We knew that we were in for a long haul, but again, the areas ... who were housed in New Orleans to run up the storm to Baton Rouge. What we did not know was that the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, and Orleans Canal — these were drainage canals separating the waters of Lake Pontchartrain from the city — had given way. We didn't know it at the time, but what had turned from a storm that was devastating in its own right turned deadly, to the tune of about ...
The ultimate conundrum during that first week or two was holding two bottles of bottled water. The question we had to ask ourselves: do you drink it because you're thirsty, or do you bathe with it? You can imagine what things smelled like after a few days of no power, no sewerage, nothing. It was a few days after the storm had passed when I took the first aerial tour of the city to see just how bad it was. I took off on probably that Wednesday or Thursday ... said, 'You're okay.' He said, 'Mr. West, I am not accustomed to seeing this level of damage unless we found a town. I never thought I would see scenes like this in the United States of America.' And at 5,000 feet slightly above, I was looking at what I thought were the foundations of homes with the ground as the backdrop. As I lowered in altitude, I realized I wasn't looking at the foundations of homes with the ground as the backdrop. I was looking at ...
...from their room. The only images on television in Baton Rouge was the Lower Ninth Ward, where the levee had given way. There wasn't a lot of detailed information about how bad it was because, again, the city was literally on its back. It was a room not unlike this where the employees were gathered, and they were waiting for me to tell them. I couldn't get into the narrative around what I saw before the questions came to me in rapid succession: 'What about New Orleans East? What about St. Bernard Parish? What about — Rod, you know — where I live in Uptown and in Lakeview?' All I could muster: 'Six feet of water. What about my neighborhood? Nine ...'
...enjoy the culture of being housed and staged in a strategic location to come back to bring power back to the city. That the two days of clothing that they brought with them was all they had left. That they were, like the tens of thousands of their fellow New Orleanians, they were homeless — absolutely homeless. And of course, their parents are our employees, and their spouses and family members trying to hold it together for the kids. But the ...
...me personally, that the weight of the authority that came with the position I had with these employees within the company was overwhelmed by the awesome sense of responsibility that I felt, and that we as a company felt towards them. Because we were going to ask these same employees to come back to neighborhoods that they did not live in, to rebuild infrastructure, and to come to work every day not knowing how they and their own lives and their own families were going to pick up the pieces.
In terms of what we all saw from our various points, notice that the only area of the city that did not flood was what we call 'the sliver on the river.' That is the crescent-shaped area along the Mississippi River that includes, to the west, Carrollton Avenue, St. Charles Avenue; from west to east, picks up the French Quarter and what we know is the central business district. Interestingly enough, that's about the area of the original settlement of the city of New ...
...is the rebuild of New Orleans. We knew that we were the roux — that there would be no rebuild if we did not do a successful job in restoring the critical infrastructure that supported the city. That meant electricity, that meant gas, certainly sewer and water, and the levees. We learned at six years old that electricity and water didn't mix. We began the rebuild in the areas that were dry. And I remember telling General Honoré, 'We will follow the water.' That meant that ...
...who are New Orleanians. What do you think is the demographic makeup of the original sliver on the river? It is presumptively — and was presumptively ten years ago — viewed as predominantly well-to-do, if not predominantly white. That dynamic, irrespective of the laws of physics, fed a narrative that haunted me and haunted us as Entergy as we were going about the business of trying to rebuild and bring infrastructure back to the city. I was out of town talking to a group of New Orleans displaced ...
...and disenfranchised African Americans from returning to New Orleans. I won't go into how offensive that was to me personally; it was offensive to the men and women of Entergy who were risking life and limb literally to bring power back under this plan. But I told the woman, 'Ma'am, I'm not the reason you can't come back home. I know where you live in the Ninth Ward, off of Tupelo Street.' Her entire block no longer existed. That scene played itself out over and over again as we were trying to communicate to people who couldn't repopulate the city. Remember, we ...
...could at least follow the water. For the ensuing probably two to three years, candidly, as we went through a process where New Orleans was defined by the FEMA trailer experience and everything that our customers endured trying to get off their back, to get on their knees, to crawl, then to walk, to run. When too much of the debate during those difficult times was around whether or not New Orleans should be rebuilt or the sensibility — the absolute nerve — the ...
...the world who had ever been built below sea level. I will tell you that the narrative around New Orleans was a difficult one within which our corporate entity had to respond. Because our corporate headquarters left New Orleans and relocated to Mississippi. And to be sure, the state of Mississippi — and we tip our hat to them because they took care of us — they're also in our service territory. They wanted the corporate headquarters to stay, and they gave our Board of Directors a whole host of reasons why Entergy should not come back.
America's great cities. I got a bird's-eye view of true resilience, true determination. Those same employees were the very ones who went door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood, asking and talking to customers: 'Are you gonna come back? If we rebuild it, will you come back?' It was an absolute matter of pride for us. In the ten years since, there's a lot that we take a great deal of pride in seeing about our city. The other elements of that gumbo have manifested themselves with the resurgence of the New Orleans economy. The Army Corps ...
...500 company headquartered in New Orleans was coming back and was willing to risk capital. We've talked with investment bankers, mortgage companies, insurance companies, and they told us that that was a significant signal in their decision to begin insuring homes, rebuilds, and purchases. What has transpired in the last decade has been a matter of great pride for us. We were not 100 percent sure that the city would come back — 80 percent of the citizens evacuated. But we felt the obligation, and had the obligation, to make power available for customers who wouldn't be ...
...some of whom we picked off the roofs of houses days after the storm. The only thing that those employees were interested in doing was coming to work to rebuild their city. From the days after the storm to the very moment that these lights came on in this facility today, we're not simply in the business of powering an electric grid or a gas system. We are, in fact, together powering life.