A damaging outbreak of severe weather across the nation’s heartland, toppled trees, snapped lines and disrupted power to SWEPCO customers across the ArkLaTex region.
Powering the response: SWEPCO is responding. Post-storm assessments are well underway and dozens of crews from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama have begun to arrive and join with SWEPCO’s line and tree crews.
At peak, approximately 61,000 SWEPCO customers were without power.
As of 6 p.m., power has been restored to roughly 44,000 customers. All hospitals and critical care facilities are online.
Because of excessive damage to electrical equipment including transmission and distribution systems, SWEPCO customers should prepare for extended power outages and in some cases additional outages could occur as we repair damage to our system.
Based on the number of outages and crews available, we develop a Global Estimated Time of Restoration or ETR, which is an estimate of how long it will take to restore 95% of all customers affected.
The more damage there is to the system, the further out in time the global ETR will be.
Latest restoration times include the following:
· Henderson, TX – 10pm Tonight
· Natchitoches and Mansfield – 10pm Tonight
· Marshall, Carthage, and Mt Pleasant, TX – 10pm Tuesday, April 30
· Hornbeck, LA – 10pm Tuesday, April 30
· Shreveport and Bossier, LA – 10pm Wednesday, May 1
As work progresses, additional updates will be forthcoming.