Cable reels in Louisiana: plants, ports and storm work

Where Louisiana reels come from

Louisiana doesn't make much wire and cable of its own; none of the makers whose location pages we checked lists a plant in the state. What it does is use a lot of it. The stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is lined with refineries, chemical plants and terminals, and the Lake Charles area to the west has another cluster. Industrial construction and turnarounds at those sites run power, control and instrumentation cable by the mile.

On top of that come utility line crews, offshore and marine work out of the Gulf Coast ports, and hurricane restoration that can empty hundreds of reels in a few weeks. The result is a state with plenty of empties and no plant next door to send them back to.

• Petrochemical plant and refinery construction along the river and around Lake Charles
• Utility distribution and transmission rebuilds
• Storm restoration staging yards after hurricanes
• Offshore and marine cable work through the coastal ports
• Rural fiber builds across the parishes

Entergy, Cleco and SWEPCO

EIA's 2024 table of Louisiana's top five retailers is all utilities, four of them investor-owned: Entergy Louisiana, Cleco Power, Southwestern Electric Power Company and Entergy New Orleans, followed by Southwest Louisiana EMC. Entergy Louisiana serves much of the south and the river corridor, Cleco the center of the state, SWEPCO the northwest around Shreveport, and Entergy New Orleans the city itself.

Low, wet ground across south Louisiana makes underground work demanding, and the overhead system takes the brunt of every storm. After major hurricanes, utilities have rebuilt long stretches of transmission and distribution, and every rebuild leaves reels in staging yards.

Hurricane season and the reels it leaves

Hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30. When a big storm comes ashore, utilities bring in crews from across the country, and cable comes in by the trailer. Reels empty fast and get stacked wherever there's room. Once the lights are back on, those staging areas hold big, mixed piles of empties from many makers.

Those piles are a normal lot for us. The work is in sorting them: grouping by size, setting aside the broken ones, and counting. Even a rough count by flange size is enough for a first quote.

1. 01

   Sort by flange

   Big reels in one row, mid-size in another, small in a third.

2. 02

   Count each size

   Read the reel stencil for traverse and drum, or measure one reel per group.

3. 03

   Pull out the wrecks

   Split arbor holes, flanges cracked through and reels with most staves gone.

4. 04

   Photograph and send

   A wide shot, one stencil per size and the parish and town.

Water, wood and storage

South Louisiana's heat, rain and high water table are hard on wooden reels. A reel lying on its rim in standing water wicks moisture into the flange plies and the drum staves. After a few months the rim goes soft and the nails loosen. A reel standing on its flanges on a shell or gravel pad, with space around it, stays sound much longer.

When you send photos of a Louisiana lot, get close to a flange edge and the bottom of the drum. Those show us whether the wood has held up, and they save a wasted truck.

Getting around the state

I-10 crosses south Louisiana from Lake Charles through Lafayette and Baton Rouge to New Orleans and Slidell, much of it on long bridges over the Atchafalaya Basin and the swamps. I-12 runs north of Lake Pontchartrain from Baton Rouge to Slidell. I-49 runs north from Lafayette through Alexandria to Shreveport, where it meets I-20, which crosses the north of the state through Monroe to Vicksburg. I-55 heads north from the New Orleans area into Mississippi.

Trailers move easily along those routes, but plant sites can have strict access rules: badging, safety orientation, set gate hours and escorts. Tell us about those before we arrange a pickup. Loads from Shreveport often pair with east Texas or south Arkansas, and loads from the Northshore with south Mississippi.

BEAD in Louisiana

NTIA's June 2023 BEAD table allocated Louisiana $1,355,554,552.94. Rural parishes across the north and center of the state and the low-lying coastal communities all have unserved homes. Fiber there goes on poles through the pine woods or under soft ground in the south, and builders burn through reels doing it.

Those crews also need empties of the right drum size to take back cable they cut. If you're building and short, send us the cable diameter and footage, and we'll look for a lot in or near the state.

Buying reels for a Louisiana job

Contractors in Louisiana come to us for reels in a few common situations. A plant turnaround needs cable cut into lengths for different crews. A utility contractor has to pull back cable from a failed run and store it. A fiber crew needs empties to take remnant cable from one segment to the next. In each case the question is the same: what cable, how much, and where.

From the cable's outside diameter and the footage per reel, we work out the drum, traverse and flange that will hold it with the clearance the NEMA formula allows. Then we look for a lot near you, in Louisiana or across the line in Texas or Mississippi, because a reel that only has to travel from Lafayette to Lake Charles costs far less to deliver than one from out of the region. If we can't find the size in sound condition, we tell you and suggest the next size that will work.