A power outage affecting Bowie Elementary School and a stretch of State Highway 123 disrupted the San Marcos area Friday morning after multiple electric pole fires caused downed power lines and traffic signal outages. Bluebonnet Electric’s outage map showed more than 1,300 customers without power in the 5 a.m. hour and was restored around 9 a.m.
A little after 6 a.m. SMPD advised drivers to avoid SH 123 between Rattler Road and Wonder World Drive due to unsafe conditions. Power lines were reported down in the area and traffic signals were not functioning. Motorists were urged to seek alternate routes.
San Marcos CISD confirmed no other schools were impacted by the outage. Despite the outage, Bowie Elementary remained open to receive students.
The fire caught multiple wooden electrical poles on fire at the very top.
“We had multiple locations of weather-related pole top fires and why that occurs is, it’s not uncommon, especially after you’ve had a prolonged period without rain, when dust and pollen can build up on cross arms and insulators,” Will Holford, manager of Public Affairs at Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, said. “Then when you have damp, moist conditions like we had this morning, then you get a film. It becomes kind of a film of moisture and dirt. And what happens is, the electricity from the power lines will track over that film, over the surface of the insulator, and to the cross arms through that moist film and arc over to the wooden power pole. It’ll become enough that electricity will start a fire on the top of a wooden power pole near that cross arm.”
When this occurs, Bluebonnet stated that they communicated directly with impacted customers via text message to keep them appraised of any updates. For the repair, crews have a few options to fix or replace the pole, both of which happened on Friday.
“In most cases, our crews will go out, they’ll extinguish the fire and then they will remove the damaged pole or the damaged top of the pole. They’ll just cut it off with a chainsaw or saw, and then they will replace it and replace any of the damaged equipment, like the cross arm and the insulators. They’ll just replace that, put a new cross arm and insulator on the undamaged portion at the top of the pole, and then reattach the power lines. And that’s usually how we fix it. Some of those poles [Friday] morning, we had a couple of poles that were damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced. And so that that was what took a little bit longer on some of those outages.”
