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An SMEU lineman in a bucket works to restore power. Daily Record photo by Gerald Castillo

Outage worst since Harvey

Substation Failure
Sunday, July 15, 2018

Those who had the option fired up their generators on Thursday as a power outage hit a significant portion of San Marcos.

The city’s director of Public Services Tom Taggart said about 1,500 services — or around 3,000 residents — lost power when a lightning arrestor failed at a Ranch Road 12 substation around 11:40 a.m. That substation powers an area including Craddock Avenue and the Westover area all the way down to Hutchison Street between Wonder World Drive at Moore Street, Taggart explained.

“It didn’t extend to the other side of the university or downtown,” he said. “The vast majority of town was still powered.”

The failure occurred on the Lower Colorado River Authority’s transmission side of the substation rather than the city’s transmission side. Taggart said crews from both entities worked until power was restored, something that was finally accomplished minutes before 8 p.m.

“It was a significantly longer outage than we would normally experience,” Taggart said, probably only equalled in scope to problems the city experience last year during Hurricane Harvey.

Tracy Herman of Brookdale North, said residents at that facility — many of whom grew up without electricity — made the best of the situation.

“It happened just as we started serving lunch. Everybody got fed, then we were upstairs in the dining room playing games.”

She said around 4 p.m. they began to transfer people who lived downstairs via stairs because the elevator was out. “There was a little bit of complaints,” she said, adding that the power was restored just in time. “We all did it, but if it had been much longer we wouldn’t have been smiling much longer. We were right at our wit’s end.”

Herman said although some of the facility’s residents depend on oxygen, they don’t depend on wall plugs but batteries instead. “We had to change one lady’s cylinder,” she said, adding that for the most part, those resients carry around their power supply on their walkers. “None of that runs on our power,” she said.

In a similar vein, Taggart said that people who had equipment that needed charging could do so city facilities that still had power.

The library posted on Facebook that residents could come there to cool off, read and use computers, while the Activity Center had rooms with chairs set up.

The Holland Street Lutheran Church also invited people to come cool off there.

Taggart said the city does maintain a registry for people whose medical needs make them dependent on electricity and they can sign up for it through their utility bills.

“It doesn’t really give us the ability to restore power more quickly to someone who has that kind of problem — particularly when a substation is out. There’s not a way of switching that over” to other feeds.

The registry does, he said, help the city “keep track of those kinds of issues with an eye toward mitigating concerns whenever we can.”

Taggart said in order to not overwhelm the system, power was restored in stages, with some areas back on as early as 5:10 p.m.

People who had food spoil can contact the city’s Risk Manager Cindy Conyer. “She can tell them about whether they would need to file a claim.”

San Marcos Record

(512) 392-2458
P.O. Box 1109, San Marcos, TX 78666