Atmos Energy Corp., the largest natural gas distributor in Louisiana and Mississippi, hopes to have 70% of its most affected customers back in service within six months and 90% in service within a year, the CFO said Wednesday.

Speaking at the Lehman Brothers CEO Energy/Power Conference in New York City. J. Patrick Reddy said the company is continuing to assess its operations, which were damaged when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

“Understandably, Atmos is right now focused on the safety and well being of our employees,” Reddy told financial analysts. It also is reviewing how to rebuild service to the most devastated areas around New Orleans.

Reluctant to offer damage assessments, Reddy said he offered the time frame for repairs based on “numbers that are raw…We don’t serve New Orleans, but we serve several parishes surrounding the city,” including the devastated St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, along with St. Tammany and Jefferson.

The storm affected 230,000 of Atmos’ Louisiana and Mississippi customers, or about 7% of its customer base. Atmos does not serve Biloxi, MS, another hard hit area. Atmos serves 654,000 utility customers in Louisiana and Mississippi, and serves 3.1 million across the country.

Reddy noted that Atmos does not plan to bill customers affected ‘for the foreseeable future..when we can determine whether a place is inhabitable.”

“We’ll take this premise by premise to validate these results,” he said. “We’re about 10 days into the process of assessing…We’re gathering information, but in some cases, we’re not able to get into some of those neighborhoods. We will need to do a home-by-home assessment in some cases.”

Atmos is not expecting to find as much physical damage as electric suppliers because the pipeline infrastructure is underground.

Despite the massive storm, Atmos still expects to earn in the middle of it projected range of $1.65-1.75/share for fiscal 2005.

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