BATON ROUGE, La. — The fearsome heat of a South Louisiana summer, unmediated by air-conditioning, reduces the strong to a primal struggle and sends the weak to the hospital.

Thousands here are enduring it this way seven days after Hurricane Gustav. Nearly 40 percent of the city’s electrical power remains out, and the principal utility, Entergy, says it will be the last week of September before everyone’s electricity here in the state capital is restored.

Whole neighborhoods are sweating it out, discovering things about the natural setting, themselves and their neighbors they did not know and in some cases did not particularly want to know. Front doors are open, generators are humming, downed tree limbs are piled high, and the people are dripping.

Power blackouts have been widespread in South Louisiana in the last week. More than 200,000 of Entergy’s customers in Louisiana were still without power Monday, down from nearly 829,000 immediately after the storm.

“It’s sort of paralyzed the economy of the state,” said Foster Campbell, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Politicians are fuming, literally and figuratively. Several are vowing investigations and promising a closer look at warding off the failures that are, in Louisiana, as common as the violent summer storm.

This one, however, is a marathon. And it is particularly hard to swallow now that New Orleans, the resented city downriver, has had its power restored, and just downright unpleasant when the thermometer reads 95 and the humidity is right there with it.

“I’m not coping; I’m just existing,” said Marilyn O’Brien, standing outside her son’s house in Capital Heights, a pleasant district of 1920s houses under towering trees, many of them now fractured by the storm. Ms. O’Brien looked haggard. The yard was covered in downed power lines and chunks of tree trunk her son had diligently sawed. He has no power, and neither does she.

“I don’t know how the Iraqis have done it,” she said. “Your energy’s zapped, and you’re wet. My clothes feel like another layer of skin. And I’ve not slept in a week.”

Down the street, the power failure sent 73-year-old Verien Flaherty to the hospital with heat exhaustion and dehydration by the second day. Her little house, she said stoically, had become “quite hot and smelly.” By Monday, though, her son had procured a generator, and she was sitting in the darkened living room.

Nearby were fleets of Entergy trucks, not working fast enough for most of the people here. Entergy says the hurricane roared right up the path of its major transmission lines, knocking out all 14 of them between here and New Orleans. Some 8,000 poles went down too, all carrying above-ground wires. Giant steel towers holding the lines were pushed to the ground like a child’s Erector set.

Alex Schott, a spokesman for Entergy, said the company was “restoring power at record speeds.” The company’s lines suffered “a lot of damage,” Mr. Schott said, and Baton Rouge was “where the brunt of it occurred.”

Even longtime critics of Entergy, a profit-making regional energy company that is a monopoly or near-monopoly in many places and whose stock has steadily risen over the last eight years, say burying the power lines may not be practical in a place like South Louisiana, where water is rarely far from the surface.

But there could be other ways of protecting the power system from the strong storms that regularly batter this coastal state. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said Monday that she was working on legislation to give the government a role in strengthening the transmission lines here, “so that when disaster strikes, our communities will not be faced with needless and endless power outages.”

Mr. Schott said Entergy might be interested in such strategies, “as long as costs are recoverable” — in all likelihood, paid by the customers.

An aide to Ms. Landrieu spoke of encasing the lines in reinforced pipe, as is done in Europe.

Mr. Campbell, the public service commissioner, said it was “totally unacceptable for people to be out two, three weeks without electricity.” He made note of what has become a particular irritant in light of the failures, the sky-high power bills that are a feature of life here.

“There’s a great irony here: we have some of the poorest people in the country, and some of the highest utility rates in the Southeastern U.S.” said Mr. Campbell, who added that he was “not interested in giving Entergy any money for this storm.”

In Capital Heights, the accent was on stoicism. “Our house is sweaty hot,” said Kelly Nelson, a hospital physical therapist. “You go to sleep at 9 o’clock, you wake up at 11 at night, hoping it’s time to go to work.”

Across the street, Keith Morris, an artist, was wet but smiling. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m 58 years old. I’ve lived in Louisiana and in Siberia, and it’s a hell of a lot easier here than in Siberia.”

For others, the unwonted exposure to that basic element of Louisiana life made them rethink a commitment that often demands so much. “I’ve lost my attachment to something that hurts me,” Ms. O’Brien said.

“It has beaten me up, so I feel like divorcing it,” she said. “I would leave Louisiana.”