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Insights > Meet the Pros: Marcelle Piglia
Meet the Pros: Marcelle Piglia
02/14/2025
Meet Marcelle Piglia, an incident response manager in the crisis readiness and response group, based out of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Piglia, who has a Bachelor of Science in finance from Louisiana State University and a Master of Accounting degree from the University of Missouri—St. Louis, grew up in Harvey, Louisiana. She joined Entergy in 2019 as a financial analyst lead for the utility finance and strategy group. She later changed roles to be the financial analyst lead for Entergy Louisiana prior to joining the incident response group.
“Our team is responsible for ensuring employees assigned to incident response roles are trained and prepared to respond when the company experiences a disruption in normal operations,” said Piglia. “We recognize that responding to incidents is not part of most employees’ everyday jobs, and that it can be intimidating to be activated for storm duty not knowing what to do or what is expected of them.”
The goal of the training and exercise programs is to better prepare Entergy’s workforce to efficiently and effectively respond to incidents. “We do this by determining what each role needs to know to be successful in its area of incident response, assisting with setting up and tracking incident role training and testing our preparedness with a variety of exercises throughout the year,” said Piglia.
The direct impact we have on our customers during incident response activities is one of Piglia’s favorite things about her job.
She noted, “Preparing our employees to feel more knowledgeable and comfortable when they temporarily step away from their day jobs to respond to a storm or some other kind of incident is so rewarding.”
The company and our customers benefit from the efficiency of our company’s incident response training program with potential shorter restoration times and lower costs. Like many Entergy employees, Piglia notes how impactful it is to see the connection our company has to the communities we serve during storm restoration--an opportunity she didn’t always have in her day job which is why she values each incident response role.
“My current storm role is serving as the deputy administration section chief, and I enjoy it. The administration section roles are responsible for the administrative tasks that are involved in storm restoration,” said Piglia.
The administration team does a great deal of work while response crews are actively restoring customers’ power. In fact, many of the workers who support this team stay activated after restoration is complete in order to process invoices, reconcile credit cards, refine cost estimates and assist in regulatory filings and financial disclosures.
Just recently Piglia had the opportunity to support the company’s preparation efforts for the Taylor Swift concert and the Super Bowl-two events that were big economic boosts to the city.
“My first involvement with the Taylor Swift concerts and Super Bowl planning started in January 2024 when the incident response team was asked to co-present very early plans for Super Bowl LIX and what changes have taken place since the last time New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl in 2013. Over the next few weeks, that morphed into me leading the planning team for both events.”
The planning team consisted of several business functions – power delivery, security, power generation, facilities, event planning, customer service and many more – all with their own objectives for Super Bowl planning. Piglia was charged with ensuring those plans were moving forward, understanding each function’s plans, and forming it all into one cohesive plan. She, along with several others, also represented Entergy in two Super Bowl sub-committees led by city agencies and had the opportunity to engage with external stakeholders.
“This Super Bowl was important for our company following the power outage that occurred during the 2013 Super Bowl,” said Marcelle. “We went into the event confident we would not see a repeat of the outage that occurred in 2013.”
Several upgrades were made within the Superdome and to Entergy’s infrastructure serving the Superdome since 2013, including the equipment that was determined to cause the outage. As part of the massive renovation, Caesar’s Superdome upgraded its lights from metal halide to LED, which take a much shorter amount of time to power up. Entergy has served the Superdome through several large events since 2013 without any power interruptions, but used the Taylor Swift concerts in October as a dry run to ensure the team would successfully execute all business functions.
“It has been quite an experience seeing it all come together, and I am very proud of what this team accomplished over the last several months – not to mention a hurricane and a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm impacting us in that time frame, too!”
Piglia noted that similar to her feelings on incident response, she finds joy in seeing Entergy and many other organizations come together with the common goal of making New Orleans shine throughout events like Super Bowl week.
When she sees the company’s involvement in, and impact on, the communities we serve, Piglia is proud to work for Entergy, especially when the company's involvement positively impacts her hometown of the New Orleans Metro-area.
Outside of work, Piglia enjoys spending time with her husband, two sons and two dogs. She enjoys reading, traveling, being with family and friends, spending time outside and practicing yoga.
