The St. Charles line was out of service for about two hours yesterday, due to a lightning strike.  According to Da Paper, lightning hit a feeder line to an Entergy substation, taking out several sections of Uptown, including the 600VDC feed to the streetcars.

Service resumed around 6pm CDT.

Judging by the reports, this must have been a significant outage.  After the storm, one of the reasons the St. Charles line was slow to come back was because NORTA and Entergy did significant power upgrade/modification work at the same time as the storm repairs.  A minor outage (lightning hitting a substation, for example) should not have brought the line to its knees.