Energy company Entergy has assembled a workforce of nearly 2,000 restoration workers committed to restore electrical service disrupted in Louisiana by Tropical Storm Barry. Its gas distribution workforce is ready to respond to disruptions of gas delivery in its Baton Rouge and New Orleans areas, the company says.

After landfall and as soon as it is safe to do so, Entergy will immediately begin assessing damages and restoring power. This process could take several days depending on the severity of the storm’s impact.

Currently forecast to be a Category 1 hurricane at landfall, the storm is expected to bring heavy rains, high tides and coastal and river flooding that could impact the service territories of energy companies and cause widespread outages. Entergy says crews and contractors are continuing to mobilize to locations where they can quickly respond once the storm passes and it is safe to start restoration work. The company must wait until sustained winds are less than 30 mph to use bucket trucks.

With the storm forecast to become a hurricane, it could take up to several days to restore power, warns Melonie Stewart, Entergy Louisiana’s vice president of distribution operations and Louisiana’s incident commander.

“This is the first time we’ve had a tropical system with water levels on the river this high,” Jeffrey Graschel, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center in Slidell, Louisiana, told CNN.

Citing a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement notice, Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Gulf of Mexico operators had shut-in 1.01 million barrels a day of oil production because of the storm. “Almost 1.24 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas production is also closed,” the outlet said.

The storm may be one of the biggest tests to the New Orleans’s pump-and-levee protection system since Hurricane Katrina, the New York Times reports.