Power back after massive outage

HOUSTON, TEXAS - Repair crews restored electricity overnight to 150,000 homes that lost power across seven counties when storms blew down power lines that triggered an emergency shutdown at a Montgomery County power plant.

Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for the Louisiana-based power company Entergy, said that those whose lights went out around 7 p.m. June 15 had their power back within about four hours.

High winds from East Texas storms apparently knocked down 16 transmission lines last night, Rodgers said, causing a voltage imbalance that sent the company's Lewis Creek plant in Willis into emergency shutdown, damaging two generators. The shutdown caused an insulating blanket to catch fire at the plant, but it was a small blaze that was quickly extinguished, Rodgers said.

Power was restored when 15 of the 16 lines were fixed, but the generators at the plant north of Houston remain out of commission this morning, and Entergy is asking customers to go easy on their electricity today to avoid overloading the system.

Entergy has agreements with some of its industrial customers that allow the company to cut back the amount of electricity they get, and home customers can voluntarily help avoid an overload by putting off energy-consuming tasks like running dishwashers and washing machines until at least this evening and bumping up thermostats to 78.

Wednesday night's widely scattered outage backed up traffic, shut down retailers, forced the Conroe Regional Medical Center to divert emergency-room patients to other hospitals and prompted officials to put several state prisons into lockdown mode.

Affected counties included Montgomery, Trinity, Liberty, Polk, San Jacinto, Madison and Grimes.

The outage sparked a flood of calls Wednesday to local law enforcement agencies from residents wondering what happened.

"There's been a lot of alarms going off, and people calling needed information about what's going," said Julie Woods, communication supervisor for the Conroe Police Department.

Some, however, took the blackout in stride. "We were in the swimming pool when the power went out," said Jeff Cullingford of Conroe. "So we decided to go for ice cream."

Instead, they ended up at Lowe's Home Improvement store on Texas 242, where they bought some flood lamps to make it through the outage and some lawn furniture they found on sale.

As the only store open in the College Park shopping area Wednesday night, Lowe's employees continued to work the registers after the normal 9 p.m. closing time to serve a steady stream of customers seeking blackout supplies, such as batteries and flashlights. The store was half-lighted thanks to its on-site generator.

"Our lights went out for a split second, then the generator came on," sales manager Ted Harris said. "Our registers were working, so we had to do our normal business."

Traffic at the intersection of Texas 242 and Interstate 45 was stop-and-go as drivers tried to navigate in the dark. A line of cars stretched about a half-mile in the westbound lanes of Texas 242 as drivers waited their turns to get through the intersection.

The outage created what one Liberty County police dispatcher described as a ghost town there. All of the community's streets lights and traffic lights were out.

Generators had to be used at Conroe Regional Medical Center to supply enough electricity for "all necessary functions," a hospital spokeswoman said. The 332-bed hospital diverted emergency-room patients to other facilities.

As a result of the outage, inmates at some Southeast Texas prisons were forced into lockdown, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said.

She said all of TDCJ's Huntsville prison units were affected, including death row, as well as other units in Livingston, Dayton and Madison County.

"Whenever we have power outages, we immediately have lock down to restrict prisoner movement throughout the units," Lyons said. Montgomery County, which was especially hard hit by the outage, experienced at least 10 fires overnight, but no injuries resulted from any of the blazes, and authorities said it is not yet known whether any were related to the power outage.

Entergy serves an area stretching from the Texas-Louisiana border to north of Houston. The company has about 373,000 customers in 24 Texas counties.

Entergy, which owns and operates the power plant and power lines in the area, is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. The PUC, however, usually does not play an immediate role in an outage, a spokesman said.

The area is not part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, however, the organization that manages the power grid for much of Texas. It is the Western-most point of the Southeastern Electric Reliability Council, which runs as far east as North Carolina.