The ice and cold weather from Winter Storm Fern closed school districts, county and city offices and some businesses in Polk County. The area has received around 36 hours of freezing weather over the past four days. Temperatures dipped into the teens, with feels-like temps down around 11 degrees.
Anticipating a need for state resources, Polk County Judge Sydney Murphy issued a disaster declaration for Polk County in response to the forecasted ice storm.
Warming stations were set up across the county and residents were urged to complete all preparations by Saturday afternoon. They were also asked to remain at a location for the duration of the storm because of expected hazardous road conditions.
Fern began its impact Saturday evening. According to Sam Houston Electric Cooperative (SHECO), around 10,000 of its 95,000 locations lost power over the course of the storm. A total of 5,600 were the most locations without power at any given time. SHECO serves across portions of 10 counties in East Texas including Angelina, Hardin, Jasper, Liberty, Montgomery, Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, Tyler and Walker.
In Polk County, 4,985 locations experienced an outage caused by Fern, with all restored by Sunday afternoon. Isolated outages occurred later, but were limited in size and restored quickly.
So, what causes outages the most?
According to SHECO, the biggest power interrupters are limbs or green trees weighed down by ice that fall into power lines.
To pull off the task of keeping power across a large area, approximately 230 crew members and contractors worked during the peak of restoration efforts. Crews were reportedly able to resolve outages quickly.
When SHECO’s main outage response ended Sunday afternoon, some crew members and contractors offered to help neighboring electric cooperatives. As of Monday, they were working to restore service at Jasper-Newton Electric Cooperative in Kirbyville, and Deep East Electric Cooperative in San Augustine. Both cooperatives sustained serious damage to their systems.
Staff at SHECO began preparations ahead of the storm monitoring forecasts, checking equipment, staging resources around the system, and adjusting system settings to accommodate high electricity consumption due to the extreme cold. Employees participated in statewide, regional and local emergency management meetings to help facilitate a swift response.
Crews also train year-round on outage response and safety. The Cooperative’s maintenance program trims trees near power lines and works with landowners to remove dead or hazardous trees that may impact service reliability.
