As of around 9 Thursday morning, almost 8,000 people in our area remain without power due to the ice storm, which ended officially at around 3 a.m. this morning.
However, last night additional bands of rain came through into the evening, causing additional icing.
“Oncor employees, our local contractors as well as mutual assistance personnel started coming in yesterday and overnight,” said Andy Morgan, an Oncor spokesman. “They are working on these outages. They worked all night, and they are going to work all day. They are working 16-hour shifts, around the clock. We had about 1,000 utility workers yesterday from other Texas utilities, as well as other states.
Morgan said Taylor got hit harder than other parts of their service areas.
“You all continued to get ice yesterday and overnight,” Morgan said. “What we are seeing is tree branches continuing to fall, tree branches falling on ice. Sometimes the weight of the ice pulls the lines down but it also breaks the poles. So We are seeing a lot of that in the Taylor area.”
While crews are working around the clock to get our lights back on, Morgan said it was not yet possible to put a timeline on when things will be back to normal.
“We are also having issues with the roads,” Morgan said. “The roads are still very icy, so travel times are a huge factor of how quickly we can get to the outages. Once we can get to the site of the outage, whether it’s a downed line or a pole or whatever, we can fix it fairly safely and quickly but getting there is the challenge.”
