As of Wednesday at about 5 p.m., a little more than 14,000 Oncor customers remained without power after Sunday’s deadly storm. The company’s web page gives updates with estimated times of restoration based on your address. The most frustrating is the listing that says “currently unknown.”
Oncor spokesperson, meteorologist Jen Myers, says those are computer-generated estimates. How believable are they?
“Don’t get married to those numbers,” Myers says. “Don’t plan the day around that number. Best you can do is just have a plan, stay with a friend and then just hope for the best.”
Myers says crews, including some from out of state, have been working 24/7, and more than 100,000 customers have power again — some ahead of the estimate, some later than the listed time. She says it’s hard to know when all the work will be done.
“The problem here is we have got so many outages that those numbers change very rapidly because we have so many deciding factors that go into the restoration time,” Myers says.
What kind of factors? She says that depends.
“What kind of power outage it is, what kind of situation it is,” Myers says, “and then it gives an estimation based on previous outages that are very similar and then it puts out a number.”
Myers knows those still without power are frustrated. She says that’s why the crews are putting in long days working hard.
