How to Prepare Your Shreveport Home for Hurricane Season: An Electrical Safety Guide

Shreveport doesn't take a direct hit from hurricanes the way the coast does, but every single year the remnants of Gulf systems push north up I-49 and dump tropical-storm-force winds and rain across Caddo and Bossier Parish. Laura in 2020, Delta two weeks later, Ida in 2021 — each one left tens of thousands of SWEPCO customers in the dark, some for more than a week. The homes that came through with the least damage weren't lucky. They were prepared. Here's exactly how to get your house ready before the next system spins up in the Gulf.

Start at the service drop and weatherhead

The service drop is the overhead wire running from the SWEPCO pole to your roof or mast. Walk outside and look up at it. Any tree limb that could fall on it, rub against it, or be blown into it during 60+ mph gusts needs to come off now, not when the cone of uncertainty is already over Lake Charles. SWEPCO maintains clearance on their side of the pole; the run from the pole to your weatherhead is the homeowner's responsibility, and it's the single biggest cause of storm-related electrical damage we see in northwest Louisiana.

While you're looking up, check the weatherhead itself — the upside-down U-shaped fitting where the wires enter the mast. If you can see frayed insulation, exposed copper, a tilted mast, or pulled-away flashing, get it repaired before storm season. A compromised weatherhead during sideways rain is how water gets into your panel.

Install whole-home surge protection (it's now code)

The 2020 National Electrical Code made whole-home surge protective devices (SPDs) mandatory on new and replacement services under NEC 230.67, and Louisiana adopted it. But the requirement only triggers on new work — if your panel went in before 2020, you almost certainly don't have one, and you should.

A whole-home SPD mounts at the main panel and clamps incoming voltage spikes before they reach your wiring. A direct lightning hit will still cause damage, but the much more common scenario — a nearby strike or a switching surge as SWEPCO restores power — is exactly what these devices stop. A $200–$400 installed SPD pays for itself the first time it catches a hit that would have taken out an HVAC control board, a refrigerator inverter, or a smart panel.

Plug-in strip surge protectors at TVs, computers, and AV gear are still worth having as a second layer. But they protect one outlet; the whole-home unit protects the whole house.

Know the lost-neutral emergency before it happens

This is the single most important thing in this article, so read it twice. During high winds, the service-drop conductors can stretch or break at the weatherhead. If only the neutral opens but the two hot legs stay connected, your 240V service becomes unbalanced. Voltage on the two halves of your panel can swing from near 0V to as high as 240V depending on what's running.

The symptoms are unmistakable and they happen within seconds: lights on one side of the house go blindingly bright while lights on the other side dim to almost nothing, electronics fail in real time, and you'll smell hot insulation within a minute. Kill the main breaker immediately and call. Do not try to fix it by flipping branch breakers. Every additional minute the imbalance runs, more equipment dies.

Make sure every adult in the house knows where the panel is and how to operate the main breaker in the dark. We see panels regularly that are blocked by a deep freeze, buried in a closet that's been remodeled around, or behind storage that grew there over the years. Clear the panel before storm season.

Test your generator and transfer switch — now

If you have a standby generator (Generac, Kohler, Cummins), run the monthly self-test and verify the automatic transfer switch actually transfers. Every storm season we get calls from homeowners whose generator started, ran beautifully for the full duration of the outage, and never carried load because the ATS controller had silently died months earlier.

Check the oil, check the battery (these usually need replacement every 3 years and they always fail the day you need them), and clear leaves and wasp nests out of the enclosure. Confirm the propane or natural gas supply is on and the regulator isn't leaking.

If you run a portable generator with a manual transfer switch or generator inlet box, pull the cord out of storage now and make sure it's accessible without rummaging in a dark garage at 2 a.m. Exercise the interlock kit. If you don't have a transfer mechanism at all and you're planning to backfeed through a dryer outlet — don't. That backfeed kills lineworkers and burns down houses. The fix is an interlock kit or a manual transfer switch, and we install both routinely for $400–$900.

Test every GFCI and AFCI device

Press the TEST button on every GFCI and AFCI receptacle and breaker in the house. If it doesn't trip, it's not protecting you anymore — and these devices fail in the open position, meaning they keep passing power while no longer providing protection. They fail silently.

Pay particular attention to exterior outlets, garage outlets, bathroom outlets, kitchen counter outlets, and any outlet near the laundry hookup. After a flooding rain, those are the ones you want working.

Move what can be moved, elevate what can't

If your panel, generator, or HVAC condenser sits at low elevation and you've ever had water in the yard during a hard rain, talk to us about raising them. Code allows panels to be relocated higher on the same wall, and HVAC pads can be built up. After the storm is not the time to discover your panel sat in six inches of standing water.

Unplug what you can the day a system is forecast: TVs, computers, gaming consoles, smart home hubs, anything with a delicate switching power supply. The whole-home SPD handles the common case; physically unplugging handles the worst case.

Build a 72-hour outage kit before the cone forms

Flashlights (one per person, batteries fresh), a battery or hand-crank weather radio, a portable power station or large USB battery pack for phones, a small inverter that plugs into a car for the second day, and a printed list with your insurance carrier, your electrician's number, and SWEPCO outage reporting. Phones die. Internet dies. Paper doesn't.

If the storm hits anyway

Don't walk into standing water near any energized equipment. Don't touch a downed line — call SWEPCO at 1-888-216-3523 and stay back at least 35 feet. If your service mast has been torn off the house, the wires are still live; only the utility can de-energize them. Once the line is dead and the mast or weatherhead is the problem, we can rebuild it, coordinate the SWEPCO reconnect, and get you back up — usually within a day of the utility clearing the area.

We answer 24/7 across Shreveport, Bossier City, Haughton, Benton, Keithville, and Greenwood. No overtime, weekend, or holiday surcharges. After-storm calls are prioritized by safety: anything smelling, smoking, or sparking goes to the front of the queue.

The short version

• Trim trees away from the service drop
• Install whole-home surge protection
• Test the generator and transfer switch
• Know how to kill the main breaker in the dark
• Test every GFCI and AFCI
• Unplug sensitive electronics when a system is forecast
• Save 318-688-2788 in your phone before you need it

See: Whole-Home Surge Protection · Generator Installation · 24/7 Emergency Electrician