500,000 without power in Texas as Tropical Storm Nicholas churns slowly across state

[MULTIZ321]

500,000 without power in Texas as Tropical Storm
Nicholas churns slowly across state.

Tropical Storm Nicholas leaves 500,000 without power in Texas

Nicholas was moving across flood-prone Houston Tuesday with 45 mph winds and the potential to cause life-threatening flash floods.

www.nbcnews.com

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Richard

 

[kanerf]

One of the problems in Texas and most other states is that all the power lines are above ground. High winds or freezing temperatures and those lines go down. If it is the line from a large station than thousands down-stream will be without power. Running power lines underground solves most of these issues, but is a costly alternative. Many newer areas do have underground lines and seldom have outages of this sort.

 

[TheHolleys87]

We live far enough north of Nicholas's path that we didn't have any problems. However, after Ike we were without power for 8 days, despite having underground utilities. The issue was that the trunk line bringing power to our underground lines was down, so until they were able to fix that, having underground lines didn't benefit us much.