BEAUMONT, Texas -- Customer outages from Gustav are topping 500,000 and growing.

Nearly all of the outages were in Louisiana. The storm was expected to push west toward Texas, where the wind was beginning to accelerate.

"It's not as strong as originally projected and that's good news," said Mike Burns, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. "But we are experiencing extremely significant damage in areas."

A spokesman for Entergy says about 500,000 of the utility's 1.2 million customers in Louisiana have lost power, and the number continues to grow.

Cleco Corp., which has 273,000 customers in the state, said the number of customers without power was at 50,000 and growing.

Further east, Mississippi Power reported about 8,000 customers were without power and other Southern Co. utilities in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle reported outages totaling about 8,000.