Storm caused power outage in northern parts of town

An undetermined number of San Marcos Electric Utility customers were without power for about two and a half hours on Wednesday after two “jumper wires” burned out and led to a switch disconnecting, Tyler Hjorth, assistant director of public services at SMEU said.

The outage occurred shortly after the storm blew in around 3 p.m. and involved the Post Road and Uhland Road area, stretching past Travis Elementary School to The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Spring Lake.

Hjorth said the wires could have been struck by lightning or the failure “may have been caused by old age.” The utility’s first priority was to restore power. A full diagnosis of the failure hasn’t yet been conducted.

He said all customers had their power back on by 6:10 p.m.

Earlier in the day, a limited outage that was not weather-related occurred at Strahan Coliseum when “an equipment failure … caused us to lose one of the feeds into the coliseum.” Hjorth said no other customers were affected, and that there were no activities going on at Strahan at the time.

“A lot of people saw their lights blink,” he said, and ther wre some “instantaneous outages” where power went off only briefly before coming back on. That can be expected, he said when similar storms strike.

“Overall we rode out the storm pretty good,” he said, adding that the utility fielded more than 300 calls from customers between 3 and 6 p.m. Nearly all of them came from the outage near Post Road which also affected the Siesta Mobile Home Park. “We took quite a few calls from there,” he said.