BATON ROUGE - People living in the Southdowns and University Gardens areas say they have been experiencing repeat power outages since Sunday. The outages have happened four days in a row for hours at a time.

Mary Katherine Bernard lives on Stuart Avenue and says the first outage on Sunday lasted for about eight hours. Her newly purchased groceries had to be thrown out.

"I had gone grocery shopping on Sunday. Came home and of course my milk and everything went bad so I had to go grocery shopping again on Monday," she said.

She says the Entergy alerts have been constant. On Sunday, that alert said the cause of the power outages was a tree limb, and yesterday it said there was extreme demand on the electrical system.

"We've had summers like this every year, it's no different," said Bernard.

Down the street on Wednesday, Entergy crews worked near Stanford Avenue sorting through the issue.

Entergy says over the past several days, residential customers in or around the Southdowns area have been affected by a couple of events. The first involved electric equipment, specifically a set of reclosures that were damaged by lightning. The second involved a tree limb that fell from outside of Entergy's right of way and damaged other electric equipment nearby. The damage was extensive.

New equipment has been installed in the area, and a new reclosure will be hung this week. As part of the repair process, some customers have seen additional power outages, and Entergy says it's sorry for the inconvenience it has caused.