CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Tropical Storm Harold ripped through the South Texas coast, bringing heavy rain and some wind to the Coastal Bend.
Power outages are still affecting thousands of people in the Coastal Bend. As of 5 a.m. Wednesday, roughly 1,900 AEP customers are without power, with most of those outages being in Corpus Christi.
While many areas are starting to have power restored, AEP Texas' Omar Lopez said his team would be working well into Tuesday night to fully restore power to impacted customers.
"We've seen a lot of dropped power lines, we've seen a lot of trees that have fallen over with the heavy winds today," he said.
88-year-old Wilfred Chabot has lived in the 4900 block of French Drive for some 45 years. Wednesday morning, he was speaking with AEP crews about his electrical issues.
"This happened after the storm, during the storm, and I thought that the rain had fouled up this compressor but now the guy who came to fix it says no it's the transformer, so I don't know what it is exactly," he said.
AEP Texas brought Mike Marquez and Nolan Merriman down from Victoria to help residents like Chabot. They figured out that his home was only getting half of the power needed. So, Merriman had to go and put on some heavy climbing gear. He then scaled the power pole behind Chabot's home. The repair was made and power was restored to his home.
"On a bigger scale like this you know some people are frustrated some people are happy to see us. You know it's rewarding," he said.
On Jean Street, 3NEWS found Linetec Services truck from Austin showing up to make another repair on a leaning power line.
"It broke at the base at ground level so we are going to install a new one and dig the hole in front of it and put the new one in and transfer the primary over. It might take two to three hours, maybe four," he said.
Lopez said that AEP Texas has also received mutual aid to help restore power to impacted residents. You can track outages live on AEP's outage website here.
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