BANDERA COUNTY, Texas — At one point, more than 2,800 people were without power in Bandera County on Friday morning after an arctic blast moved into Texas on Thursday night.
You can view the Bandera Electric Cooperative Outage Map here, which at 5:45 a.m., showed more than 2,400 people in the dark. That's around 14% of the county. At 8:30 a.m., the number increased to 2,886 people without power, making that 17.24% of people in the county. Now at 3:45 p.m., the number has dropped to 99.
The Bandera County Sheriff's Office is encouraging residents to follow the BEC for updates. It's also asked that people do not call 911 for questions about power.
BEC said the following as they are reportedly experiencing record-high usage:
"We are working hard to minimize rolling outages while maintaining the integrity of our grid. Rolling outages in limited portions of our service territory are necessary to prevent long-term outages system-wide. If you experience an outage lasting longer than one hour and you have not already reported it, please report it by calling 866-226-3372 option 2, via the myBEC mobile app, or by using the myBEC website login." Click here for that link.
Silver Sage Senior Center is serving as a warming center in Bandera County. Lakehills United Methodist Church was also serving as a warming center, but closed due to a lack of volunteers.
Officials with BEC said that an equipment failure was to blame for the rolling outages, and that was repaired Friday afternoon. By Friday night, all customers in Bandera had power.
The San Antonio area is expected to warm to the 30s with the wind dying down in the afternoon on Friday. The wind chills will also not be as bad.
Warming centers are also open if needed. You can view that list here.