Strong winds, hail and heavy rain knocked out power in several areas of the city, especially in northern and eastern areas.
AUSTIN, Texas — Thousands of Austin residents are still without power after thunderstorms moved through the area on Wednesday evening.
Strong winds, hail and heavy rain brought dangerous conditions and knocked out power in several areas of the city, especially in northern and eastern areas.
As of around 6 a.m. Friday, more than 15,000 customers are still without power.
At the peak of the outages, Austin Energy Interim General Manager Stuart Riley said more than 72,500 customers were in the dark. Riley said looking at the utility provider’s outage history data, which goes back to 2012, this event was the third worst storm for outages, following Winter Storms Mara and Uri.
Riley said Austin Energy crews are working 24/7 to restore power to customers and are committed to getting everyone back online as quickly and safely as possible, but there are obstacles.
As of around 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Riley said there were 104 broken poles, but crews were still assessing the damage, so there could be more. Some roadways are blocked by toppled utility poles, and trees have fallen in some backyards, pulling down wires and poles.
“Because the damage we’re seeing is so substantial, outage restoration activities are expected to extend for multiple days,” Riley said Thursday. “There is currently no estimated time of restoration.”
Riley said when it comes to restoring power, Austin Energy takes a phased approach, with three main phases:
- Phase 1: focus on restoring power to critical life safety and public safety facilities (getting power back on to hospitals, emergency call centers, critical communications equipment), getting power back on to main lines of circuits and gathering more detailed assessments of damage
- Phase 2: prioritize outages affecting the largest number of customers
- Phase 3: focus on remaining smaller outages that are often more complex and time-consuming
“With such drastic impact to the system and the community, Austin Energy has called for mutual aid from our neighboring utilities,” Riley said. “This assistance will be crucial in providing us additional crews to support repairs and power restoration.”
Riley said more than 200 mutual aid crew members, including some from CenterPoint Energy and Oncor, will arrive Thursday afternoon to help with power restoration and tree trimming.
As always, you can check Austin Energy’s active outages on its online outage map or by using the outage tracker below:
If you have an outage, Riley said to report it by texting OUT to 287846, visiting outagemap.austinenergy.com or by calling 512-322-9100. If you receive a text about restoration, but you are still having an outage, respond to the text with OUT. Riley said smaller outages can continue after a major circuit is repaired because of damage to secondary power lines or equipment.
Meanwhile, Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative and Pedernales Electric Cooperative reported hundreds of outages as well on Tuesday.
Additionally, on Thursday afternoon, Spectrum said any service outages the company is experiencing are “largely aligned” with power outages impacting the area. Spectrum said in those instances, it is “working diligently, alongside the power companies, to make the necessary repairs to our network and get customers back online.”