At the peak of the outages, AEP Texas says nearly 12,000 customers in the Corpus Christi area alone were without electricity.<\/p>\n
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But long before the storms moved into South Texas, AEP Texas says crews were already preparing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnytime that we encounter a storm, a large storm, we follow the FEMA developed and FEMA approved process called Incident Command System,\u201d said Omar Lopez, Director of Communications for AEP Texas. \u201cIt starts about 10 or 15 days before the event happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the AEP Texas service center off Crosstown Expressway, Lopez showed 3NEWS what serves as the hub for storm response efforts. During the day, however, the lot can appear almost empty because crews are spread throughout the community responding to outages.<\/p>\n
Lopez says AEP Texas relies on its own meteorologists to monitor developing weather systems and predict where outages could happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have our own meteorologists who follow a weather pattern and they predict weather patterns for us,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cThey will look at the weather and start to let us know based on the technology that we have and just historical data, they’ll say this weather is moving into this part of your service territory. You might experience this number of outages. It’s better to start preparing.\u201d<\/p>\n
As storms move closer, Lopez says the company activates an \u201call hands on deck\u201d response.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo as the event gets closer, what we do is we declare ICS\u2026 and that means all hands on deck,\u201d Lopez said.<\/p>\n
That coordinated response can include crews from across Texas and neighboring states.<\/p>\n
\u201cMutual assistance is when we call thousands of crews from either neighboring states, our neighboring operating companies, or just other companies in general who come to Corpus Christi or wherever the storm is and help us,\u201d Lopez said.<\/p>\n
During Hurricane Harvey, Lopez says AEP Texas brought in 5,600 linemen to assist with restoration efforts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don’t even have 5,600 employees in our AEP Texas organization, and we had 5,600 linemen here,\u201d Lopez said.<\/p>\n
For Tuesday\u2019s storms, the company says it pre-positioned 264 workers before the storms arrived and brought in 50 crews from Oklahoma to assist in South Texas.<\/p>\n
Out in neighborhoods like Yale Street near Horne Road, crews worked through fallen limbs and damaged lines to restore electricity.<\/p>\n
Israel Salinas, a line mechanic who goes by \u201cIzzy,\u201d says one of the biggest obstacles crews face after storms is simply accessing damaged lines.<\/p>\n
\u201cCorpus don’t have alleys, so it just takes a while to get to,\u201d Salinas said. \u201cWe have to use backyard machines or climb poles\u2026 trees are a very big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Salinas says overgrown trees and heavy limbs are one of the biggest causes of outages after severe weather.<\/p>\n
We watched as he took a pair of shears and trimmed vines that had grown over a transformer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of times they got to climb the trees,\u201d Salinas said. \u201cIt’s dangerous\u2026 you kind of got to make sure you know what you’re taking on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lopez says storms like this also serve as preparation for hurricane season, which officially begins June 1.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe practice all year long because we know that from June 1st to November 30th, it’s important for us,\u201d Lopez said.<\/p>\n
And while outages can be frustrating for customers, Lopez says crews are working around the clock to restore power as quickly and safely as possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we are restoring power, when we are trying to restore electrical service, it could be because of a tree on a wire, it could be because of the entire infrastructure was blown away,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cWe know that it’s an inconvenience, so we are grateful because when our crews are out there, we work around the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Tuesday\u2019s storms, the company says it pre-positioned 264 workers before the storms arrived and brought in 50…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-302330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302330","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=302330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}