More than 15,000 customers are in the dark across deep South Texas after several waves of powerful thunderstorms moved across the Coastal Bend, the Ranchlands and the Rio Grande Valley overnight and into the early morning hours on Thursday, May 21.
According to AEP Texas, about 13,700 of its customers were without power as of 8:15 a.m. Thursday. The largest swath of outages was in the Coastal Bend, where 7,300 customers in the “Corpus Christi Area,” 2,300 in Alice, and 1,500 in the “Aransas Pass Area” were without power, according to company officials. Elsewhere in the Coastal Bend, 114 outages have knocked out power to 1,017 customers served by Nueces County Electric Cooperative (NEC), according to NEC outage maps. Headquartered in Robstown, NEC serves eight counties, including Nueces, Jim Wells, Kleberg, Kenedy, Duval, Live Oak, McMullen and Brooks.
Further south, another 1,750 AEP customers in the Valley woke up without power, with the largest outages north of Citrus City (563 without power), the Hargill area north of Edinburg (471 customers), and along the Rio Grande in Los Ebanos, where 134 are without power. Another 555 customers with Magic Valley Electric Cooperative (MVEC) were also without power across Hidalgo, Cameron and Willacy counties, according to MVEC outage maps.
The widespread power outages were caused by a line of powerful thunderstorms that moved westward into South Texas from Mexico overnight and into the morning Thursday. Squall lines produced wind speeds of up to 40 miles per hour, with gusts as strong as 60 mph, and may have also produced penny-sized hail, according to the Valley’s ABC affiliate, KRGV. The television station reported that 3 to 6 inches of rain had fallen across the Valley. And while much of the stronger storm lines had moved offshore as day broke, the region remains under a flood watch through 7 a.m. Monday.
In a statement, AEP officials reminded customers to “stay at least 10 feet away from a downed power line.”