Texas County suffers 2nd blackout

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Express-News: Metro and State Medina County suffers 2nd blackout By Zeke MacCormack Express-News Staff Writer

Power outages have zapped Medina County residents twice this week. The latest, on Monday, remains a mystery to the Bandera Electric Co-op.

Workers at the co-op Tuesday continued to look for the cause of a major transmission line failure that cut power for roughly an hour Monday afternoon to 6,300 homes and businesses around Pipe Creek and Medina Lake.

"We still don't know exactly what caused it," said Dennis Winright, spokesman for the Bandera-based utility that serves 24,000 customers in seven Hill Country counties.

Late Saturday, rainwater seeping into a "switch gear" in Hondo caused a short circuit in the city of Hondo's electrical facilities, cutting power to almost all 2,800 utility customers for 13 hours.

"The only ones who did have power were the prison, the hospital and the nursing homes," Hondo utility clerk John Benavides said. "They have their own generators."

City Public Service of San Antonio provided equipment to temporarily restore service about 11:30 a.m. Sunday.

"They are also going to replace the switch gear, and that will take about six weeks," Benavides said.

Winright called Monday's outage at the Bandera Electric Co-op "very unusual" because there were no high winds or thunderstorms in the area when the 69,000-volt power line stopped working about 1:30 p.m. in parts of Bandera and Medina counties.

"We're patrolling the lines. We're checking equipment," Winright said. "We're still out there working on it."

The breakdown apparently occurred in Kendall County, where the co-op transmission line leading to Pipe Creek connects with facilities of the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Police reported no major public safety problems resulting from either outage.

http://www.hearstnp.com/san_antonio/bea/news/stories/san/storypage.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=180&xlc=107120&xld=180

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 19, 2000

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Large Texas squirrel maybe?

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 19, 2000.

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