A tragic death inside a manhole left thousands of people and businesses in downtown Corpus Christi without power for almost 12 hours on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
AEP employee Lee Wane died in a manhole outside the Corpus Christi Cathedral. The tragedy forced AEP Texas to shut down power to the area from the early afternoon until almost midnight.<\/p>\n
AEP explains 12-hour power outage in Corpus Christi after employee’s death<\/p>\n
Omar Lopez, director of corporate communications for AEP, explained why the grid was shut down.<\/p>\n
“All of downtown is underground so it\u2019s all one network. We don\u2019t choose what parts to turn off. During the investigation, we turned it all off it was de-energized,” Lopez said.<\/p>\n
Lopez said the power was reactivated by 11:15 Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
The outage turned the vibrant city into a dreary collection of empty streets and dormant lights Tuesday evening. Some area businesses were forced to shut down, while others relied on backup generators to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n
Lopez says the investigation is ongoing, and he is not sure if that investigation will have any effect on the power grid moving forward.<\/p>\n
For the latest local news updates, click here<\/a>, or download the KRIS 6 News App.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A tragic death inside a manhole left thousands of people and businesses in downtown Corpus Christi without power…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[58231,155,157,156,2344,85885,85907,14428],"class_list":["post-220405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-aep-texas","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news","tag-downtown-corpus-christi","tag-lee-wane","tag-omar-lopez","tag-power-outage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}