This morning, there are only about 25,000 customers in Dallas County without power. That is a surreal way to structure that sentence—only—but that number is down from more than 320,000 since Sunday’s storm shot 70 mph winds down upon us, splitting trees and downing power lines and breaking traffic signals.
The cavalry came from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina. There were about 2,500 additional utility workers putting in 16-hour shifts, focusing their efforts around densely populated areas as well as hospitals and other essential service providers.
Oncor believes it will be able to return power to most of the city today, but some cases will take until tomorrow. The other problem: the remaining outages are really stubborn jobs. The ones left are the most complex of all, usually caused by trees and debris falling on power lines, transformers, and utility poles. So utility workers will need to get up new poles and transformers before they can install new lines. And that process returns power to just a few customers at a time.
Looking at the outage map, most of these are clustered in North and East Dallas.
However, there are still about 1,500 out in the Park Cities. At 9:50 a.m., you’ve got 660 out around Forest Lane and Hillcrest. There are about 909 clustered around Forest Lane and Grenville Ave., just south of LBJ. There are another 800 in Lake Highlands and 700 around Lochwood and Highland Meadow. There are even more in Far North Dallas: about 1,400 homes and businesses remain without power. In Farmers Branch, there are another 600.
You get the drift. For most of us, the worst has passed. But there are still 25,000 people who have been without power since Sunday afternoon. As for the traffic lights, there are 82 flashing and 306 outages. “Staff is working to address the signals that are flashing,” the city says. All the libraries are open as of 10 a.m., although Lakewood, Lochwood, Park Forest, and White Rock Hills are without power. You can still check things out, however.
Don’t go to the Lake Highlands, Samuell-Grand, Singing Hills, Thurgood Marshall, Tommie Allen, or Walnut Hill recreation centers. They’re still closed. And don’t try to swim at the pools at Everglade, Exline, Fretz, Pleasant Oaks, Tietze, or Tommie Allen parks.
