CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Over 9,000 residents in the center of the city, and southside of SPID, were affected by a power outage that peaked at around 2:00 p.m. Sunday.
The outage was caused by a system malfunction inside of a substation, which affected four circuit breakers.
Omar Lopez, Corporate Communication at AEP Texas, shared how this happened, "It was a substation malfunction. We were able to restore about three quarters of those customers within 30 minutes, and then the final 2,200 customers by the end of the hour. So everybody was restored by 2:52 p.m."
AEP was working quickly to make sure that power was restored with as little inconvenience as possible.
"It's all hands on deck because we know that any loss of electric service is an inconvenience. It can be frustrating, so we're really just grateful everyone was patient with us today," said Lopez. "So even though our crews were dispatched, patrolling lines, doing whatever we needed to do to find the fault, it was an internal fault behind those gates. So we were able to isolate that, and repair pretty quickly. We're lucky we had beautiful weather today in Corpus Christi."
It is out of the ordinary to have such a large outage on a day with clear blue skies, but Lopez warns that Springtime brings heavy winds, "So whenever we see high winds, unfortunately, sometimes those will snap power lines. Very rarely, but sometimes it does. Sometimes it'll blow tree limbs into a power line, which will cause a line to come down. If you ever see a downed power line, please consider it energized and dangerous. Stay away from downed power lines. And what happens in your neighborhood, or on your property, you can always call and report a safety hazard to our crews. We'll get to it as soon as we can."
The most effective way to report a power outage is on the AEP Texas app, or to contact their customer service number at 1(877)373-4858. You can also visit AEP Texas' website where there is an interactive map with information that's updated every 15 minutes.
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