Thousands of Texans told they won’t get power back until the end of the week
Breanne Deppisch
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Tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Austin, Texas, are expected to remain without power for another week, utility officials said, frustrating residents who say they’ve been kept in the dark, both figuratively and literally, about the status of repairs following last week’s winter storm.
More than 25,000 Austin Energy customers were without power on Monday afternoon due in large part to last week’s heavy ice and snow, which felled trees and collapsed power lines across the city.
Utility providers in Austin said those outages are now expected to last through the weekend.
Austin Energy said in a statement Sunday night: “This estimation is based on the following factors: rate of restoration since the start of the storm, number of workers involved in the restoration process, a more complete damage assessment, and weather.”
The update has caused deep frustration for residents as life returns to normal across the rest of the state and temperatures climb to 75-degree highs.
The outages also prompted Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) to declare a state of emergency for seven major countries in and around Austin, all of which he said had experienced “significant” damage from the storm.
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This year’s winter storm, which caused blackouts for 400,000 residents during its peak last Wednesday, has renewed concerns about Texas’s extreme weather preparedness and its grid capacity, especially during the winter season.
For many, the sustained blackouts were a reminder of Winter Storm Uri, the 2021 storm that killed more than 240 people and caused a near-collapse of the state’s power grid.
Others criticized Austin Energy more specifically for failing to address widespread problems with its emergency communications system and its website.
The city-owned utility provider did not hold its first press conference until 24 hours after the outages began. Instead, it relied on Twitter and other social media to update the general public.
Its online reporting tool also crashed, leaving customers without crucial information for much of the week.
And it repeatedly changed its timeline for expected outages, saying last Wednesday that customers should brace for 12-24 hours of blackouts. Later, it extended the estimate through Thursday night.
Then Austin Energy said on Thursday that it could no longer provide reliable estimates for when power would be restored.
Mayor Kirk Watson said the Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee would begin examining its response to the storm at a hearing next week.
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The city will also be completing an “after action” report to document challenges and lessons learned from the crisis, officials said at a press conference last week.
“We need to have questions answered, including how we communicate with the public, how we make sure the public knows what’s going on, and how we prevent this sort of incident in the future,” Watson said.