Power has been restored to thousands of residents in Bandera and Gillespie counties who experienced power outages on Friday morning amid freezing temperatures.
“We had an equipment failure at the Medina Lake substation,” Bandera Electric Cooperative Chief Administrative Officer John Padalino said. “That piece of equipment served over 1,400 homes. When that equipment failed, we tried to shift those homes to a different substation at the time.”
In a statement on Friday afternoon, the Bandera Electric Cooperative said the utility is experiencing “unprecedented” demand and equipment failures due to the freeze.
Earlier Friday, the utility announced that it was implementing rolling outages in Bandera, Pipe Creek and Wharton’s Dock. BEC said they will attempt to keep outages limited to 30 minutes.
“(The demand) made it very problematic to shift those number of homes to a different substation,” Padalino said. “When we tried to shift that load, other equipment along the line, kind of upstream from there, started tripping out because it became overloaded. It took us through the morning to reset all that equipment.”
