Dallas power outages: Some still without electricity nearly 1 week later
DALLAS - Most people who lost power during last week's severe weather got it restored by the weekend.
But one Dallas woman didn't get her lights back until Monday. That's because her outage only happened to her home.
A neighbor's tree ripped the line connecting her house to the power pole. Oncor didn’t come out until Monday to turn it back on.
The first couple of days without power were understandable and even bearable for the homeowner. But by day five with still no lights or AC, it was starting to take a toll.
After nearly a full week in the dark, Laura Munoz was finally able to see the light.
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"I can’t fully express how grateful I am, but it feels good," she said. "The sound of AC coming back on was the peak for me."
Munoz remembers hearing a loud popping noise last Tuesday morning right before everything went dark.
"Right when it happened at 6:22 a.m. Tuesday morning," she recalled.
Munoz soon found out the sound was a neighbor’s tree falling onto her power line. It disconnected from the power pole.
"The way that it pulled the wires, I guess it jerked it so forcefully that it damaged the housing to where my meter connects to the Oncor powers," she said.
Munoz knew she needed to call an electrician to repair it, so she did. Once the electrician said the meter was in working order, she called Oncor to come reconnect her power. But it wasn’t a quick flip of a switch.
"I would not be the least bit surprised if I spent 10 hours at least on the phone with them," she said.
In the first few days, a lot of Munoz’s time was spent on hold. When she did get through, she didn’t get many answers. In the meantime, she stayed with friends and family.
"But it felt like all of my calls and cries for help wasn’t really being addressed so just continued to be as persistent as possible," she said.
Tuesday’s storm knocked out power to more than 600,000 Oncor customers. Most of those were in Dallas County.
The numbers slowly went down as the week progressed as crews cleared brush and debris, replaced fallen lines and repaired equipment.
Monday morning, Munoz got the call she’d been waiting for: an Oncor crew was headed her way.
"I know those guys are hardworking, and I was grateful to see them working on my line finally," she said.
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After 168 hours without power, Munoz’s persistence paid off.
"I’ll never take electricity for granted again. I’ll say that, for sure," she said.
If you are still without power, Oncor asks you to check to see if there’s damage to a weather head or meter base on your home. In those cases, a licensed electrician needs to make the repairs before Oncor can reconnect power.
At last check Monday night, Oncor reports some 1,000 people are still without power in Dallas County.