Thousands Of Residents Lose Power; Officials Say Weather Likely To Blame
By: Gina Benitez
Updated: March 8, 2012
The lights went out in Abilene today. Not all of them, but enough to leave plenty of people in the dark.
"It's all weather related," says Billy Berney with American Electric Power.
Though coincidental, officials say the solar flares did not cause the temporary loss in electricity. The weather did.
Berney says, "Accompanied with the drizzle, the wet weather, that's been the source of most of the problems that we've seen."
More than 9,000 Key City customers were affected by the outages including a vital part of Abilene's infrastructure.
"It did affect the police station however, it did not affect any of our emergency services," says Detective Eric Vickers of the Abilene Police Department.
Along with the recently dry conditions, the wind was a major factor in today's outages.
Berney adds, "We have transmission lines, which are the highest voltage system that carries electricty throughtout the whole state and so that's been the source of most of the problems."
Problems that we may not have seen the last of.
"As long as the weather continues with the wind and the drizzle we may see these spotty outages for awhile," says Berney.
