Crews responded to outages across our service area overnight. Monday night's storm brought with it rain, high winds and a lot of lightning. We have outages in several counties; you can track the numbers and locations on our outage map. At this time, it appears the bulk of the damage caused by the storm was a result of lightning strikes, which caused fuses to blow. Crews are focusing on big line sections and restoring them, and then will begin visiting individual locations to make necessary repairs.
Crews will continue working to restore power to all members and expect to have everyone back on today based on the damage we are aware of at this time. At this time, they have located one downed pole in the system. They are having issues accessing some locations, since many areas have received nearly 10 inches of rain in the last two weeks.
Be sure your outage is reported through SmartHub or 1-866-MEC-ELEC.
Stay safe. If you see water over the road, turn around.
Do not approach downed power lines. Even if you do not have power, these lines can still have electricity running through them.
Outage restoration follows a process, where power is restored to larger groups of members and then crews work down to individual locations.
We are also preparing for additional storms that are predicted to move through the service area again tonight.
2 p.m. Update:
Crews are continuing to respond to individual locations to make repairs to equipment damaged by lightning in last night's storm. Crews from our Laredo office are also in the Medina County area helping to respond to member locations. At this time, we still anticipate having all power restored by this evening.
They may have issues reaching some locations, but in those cases the members will be aware of the situation.
As additional rain and storms move into the area, that could change power estimates. We are hopeful this evening's storms will be rain only, but if they bring wind or lightning it could cause additional system damage.
