AEP Texas crews continued efforts to address individual outages and pockets of outages in very remote areas of west Texas in the aftermath of last weekend’s ice storm.  Since the number of outages peaked at 7,300, crews have restored power to all but approximately 640 customers as of 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Crews have restored transmission service throughout the area, including the repairs in the Ft. Davis area which necessitated a planned outage from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.  The focus now is entirely on distribution outages, which involve working to restore service to small groups of customers or an individual case-by-case basis.   Rocky terrain, broken utility pole cross-arms and damaged power lines continue to hamper progress.

AEP Texas crews will work through the Thanksgiving holiday to complete the restoration effort; although, given the nature of the remaining outages, restoration activities could continue through the weekend in some cases.

The largest concentrations of remaining outages are situated in the Alpine and McCamey areas.   Approximately 370 outages remain in Alpine and surrounding areas although crews were able to restore service to most of the Double Diamond subdivision this afternoon.   AEP Texas crews also were able to reduce the number of outages in the McCamey area from approximately 400 at 11 a.m. to approximately 200 outages this evening.