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The caravan of out-of-state utilities trucks returned to temporary base each day around 6 p.m., becoming a familiar part of the Baton Rouge landscape after Hurricane Gustav. Barry White, who handled fuel and parking logistics for Entergy at its Mall of Louisiana staging site, saw the steady stream of crews arriving for dinner after every long day.

As the Capital Region continued to power up nearly two weeks after the storm’s Labor Day landfall, something inside White seemed to light up as daily progress reports filed in—in human form—at Entergy’s tent cities for restoration workers.

“I watch them come in, and you can see the smiles on their faces,” says White, whose regular job is meter service for the electric company’s Choctaw Drive offices.

What he saw on those faces inspired him to want to become an Entergy lineman.

“I’m ready to go on the line,” White says. “You can see them coming in and know they’ve been working hard, and you see it: ‘Today we got another [neighborhood] up.’

“They take pride in it. You know you’re part of something special when you get people’s lives back to normal.”

White also spent time at Tinseltown, another Entergy site. That location wasn’t large enough for workers to park their trucks on site, but many showered, slept, ate and sent out and received their laundry there.

Then they bused back to their vehicles and went back to work.

Frank Butler, site manager, says the Tinseltown city peaked at 18 trailers—one portable shower facility for men, another for women, one for the catering crew, one for laundry and 14 for lodging. Three levels of bunks housed 36 persons per trailer.

Under outdoor tents, workers ate breakfast and dinner on either end of their 12-hour shifts. After breakfast they grabbed lunch boxes to take with them to their job sites.

Staging-site parking lots featured the essentials to fuel the restoration work. Big silver-bullet tanks resembling gas tanks rolled in behind big rigs delivering hundreds of gallons of water for a variety of purposes.

Industrial-sized ice chests. Pallets stacked with cases of soft drinks and sports drinks. Air-conditioned tractor-trailers filled with bags of ice. Catering trucks, warmers, portable lights and a seemingly endless row of portable toilets and hand-washing stations.

The mall parking lot resembled the heavy-machinery and recreational-vehicle equivalents of a boat show, representing a dizzying array of Zip codes and state names. At Tinseltown, hundreds of telephone poles were stacked along feeder roads.

“It’s impressive the way they’re set up to handle this many people, this many linemen,” says Joe Kerr of Steubenville, Ohio. “The logistics of this whole operation have to be tremendous, and I think they’ve done one hell of a job.”

THIRSTY? The Mall of Louisiana staging site features pallets stacked with cases of water, soft drinks and sports drinks.

Kerr retired in January and began part-time work in May, planning to be on the job two days a week, filling in as needed. His new employer, J.F. Electric of Edwardsville, Ill., sent him to Baton Rouge.

On his second Friday night at Tinseltown, Kerr ate dinner as Hurricane Ike brushed past Louisiana on its way to making landfall later that night near Galveston, Texas.

“You had to hold your plate,” Kerr says. “The tent didn’t have any sides, and the wind whipped through there pretty good.”

The next day Kerr received a call advising him and his crew to go to the Mall of Louisiana for dinner. The site at Tinseltown was shut down, and the talk at dinner was marked by anticipation of leaving for Texas—and Ike’s major damage—in a day or two.

Someone from Entergy made a sign for the massive tent at the mall, between Macy’s and Halloween Express, and it welcomed workers for dinner. “Entergy Do-Drop In,” the sign read above a menu of hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, zucchini, squash and salad.

An Entergy video—reminding workers of the importance of their roles—played on an angled section of the ceiling inside the tent during mealtime. Kerr enjoyed his dinner, but he took his crew to a Cracker Barrel for breakfast that morning for a change of pace.

“When guys work hard, I like to see that they’re rewarded,” he says.

BATHROOM BREAK: Utility restoration crew members find a seemingly endless row of portable toilets and hand-washing stations at the Mall of Louisiana staging site.

After several nights sleeping in trailers, his group found lodging at a nearby hotel.

Carl Upchurch, 18, lives in Clay County, Ala., near Talladega Superspeedway. He went to work for Sumter Utilities, headquartered in Sumter, S.C., after high school graduation.

“It ain’t that hard,” he says after dinner, looking as if he could work another shift.

He seemed almost disappointed Entergy didn’t have 16-hour shifts.

“They want us back at 6 o’clock,” Upchurch says. “When we were working for Cleco, we’d stay out until 10, 11 o’clock at night. I loved it, because it was more hours, more money. I definitely wasn’t complaining, but Entergy wants us back pretty much at a certain time.”

His group was followed at dinner by a Baltimore crew that was supposed to be in Beaumont, Texas, but instead missed Ike by being routed to Baton Rouge after working in Slidell and Alexandria.

Still, Ike made its presence felt. Wind gusts in the 30- to 45-mph range caused Entergy to take down some tents during the storm’s trip through the Gulf of Mexico.

“It created a little anxiety for everybody,” Butler says.

UNDER THE BIG TOP: Entergy’s staging site at the Mall of Louisiana includes a large tent that serves as a place to eat.

White says workers arrived from far away and didn’t ask where they could sleep. They asked where to get poles, where to get fuel and where to go to work.

The first crew chief White parked behind the Rave Motion Pictures’ Mall of Louisiana 15 noticed trees on a downed power line in the distance.

“He looked at me,” White says, “and he said, ‘Man, can you get me back there?’ About two hours later, his trucks were back there, and I knew then that there was that much pride in it. All that matters is getting the job done.”

Power was restored in two days, he says, and residents gave the linemen an ovation.

“That’s where I’m coming from,” White says. “When lights started coming on, people started coming out of their houses and clapping, and they knew they were a part of something.”