A major power outage left approximately 9,000 Padre Island residents without electricity for nearly a day, raising concerns about infrastructure reliability during severe weather events, especially with hurricane season just around the corner. Neighborhood News Reporter Erin Holly asked island neighbors directly about their concerns following the outage and brought those questions to AEP Texas to get answers about what happened and how they plan to prevent similar situations in the future.
"Our main concern is, if this was just a minor storm, and this was supposedly just two lightning strikes, what's gonna happen with a bigger storm or a hurricane?" Cathy Ryden, a Padre Island neighbor, said.
Ryden, like many island residents, experienced a 21-hour power outage on Saturday following what AEP Texas described as a transmission line failure during a thunderstorm.
"The outage affected approximately 9,000 customers, which is huge for us. We don't take matters like that lightly," said Lopez.
Omar Lopez, Communications Director for AEP Corpus Christi, explained that the extensive outage occurred because the affected infrastructure was a high-capacity transmission line.
"Because the line that went down was a transmission line. Transmission lines are high-voltage lines. They carry a lot more electricity than the average distribution line that goes to your home," said Lopez.
Some residents expressed frustration about the lack of communication during the extended outage.
"I woke up. I had no power. It was dark. Didn't know what was going on," said Bartley.
The power disruption forced local businesses to close, including the only grocery store on Padre Island, Island Market IGA, which remained shuttered for two days. Staff had to discard all refrigerated products after they spoiled due to no power.
"We have restaurants out here, and the IGA, which I do go to, and I feel bad that they lost all of their food, all of their refrigerated food," said Bartley.
According to Lopez, the situation worsened due to multiple equipment failures occurring in sequence.
"Once that outage was about to be restored, we experienced another equipment failure. So those three incidents in a row, led to the prolonged power outage. But it did start from the weather," said Lopez.
AEP Texas representatives acknowledged the power outage incident as a wake-up call and indicated they have already begun addressing improvements to their response systems.
"It was a challenging weekend for us, but we have restored the power. We've made the necessary repairs to the system that needed to be made. But we've also taken a really hard look at how we managed the outage. And I can guarantee you that we are prepared for hurricane season and we're doing everything we can to make sure we do right by the customer," Lopez said.
AEP Texas crews can be seen out working on the island near the Packery Channel from Tuesday, May 6 to Thursday, May 8, doing what Lopez calls "preventative maintenance" to strengthen the system of power lines on the island, to hopefully prevent extreme power outages like this one from happening again.
“This weekend was a wake-up call for us. It really showed us that even on a smaller storm, the result and the outages can be just as significant. So, we’ve already started addressing how we can do better, how we can make those repairs a little faster," Lopez said.
This story was reported by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
For the latest local news updates, click here, or download the KRIS 6 News App.
Catch all the KRIS 6 News stories and more on our YouTube page. Subscribe today!
