AUSTIN (KXAN) — Lightning and dust — not ice and downed trees — were the cause of a few major outages in Central Texas during this weekend’s winter storm. Local power providers reported relatively few outages since Friday, January 23, but battled the unusual causes of power loss quickly.
“Very, very few were related to ice accumulation. We just didn’t see that, over the weekend,” said Will Holford with Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative.
Bluebonnet reported about 85 outages in the KXAN viewing area, affecting about 4,600 customers.
Early in the weekend, an outage was caused by power poles catching fire. A similar incident occurred in San Marcos, causing an outage on Friday morning. Fog and high humidity interacted with dust and pollen that built up on power poles, Holford said, which caused a fire.
Thunder sleet
Another issue: lightning strikes. On Saturday, the winter storm brought freezing rain, sleet and lightning to Central Texas.
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“At the height of our outages, we had about 4,000 of our customers without power. And that was primarily due to lightning strikes,” said Matt Mitchell with Austin Energy. Bluebonnet reported a similar cause to some of their outages…