Power Outage at San Antonio Airport

By John W. Gonzalez - Express-News
More than 12,000 San Antonio homes and businesses were without electricity Thursday afternoon due to winds that battered area power lines earlier in the day.

Initially more than 10,500 scattered customers were without power, and power was quickly restored for all but 1,300 of them, but the relentless winds caused more problems later in the day, leaving about 12,500 customers without power, according to CPS Energy.

At midday, Terminal 1 of the San Antonio International Airport lost its main power source for 90 minutes, and the entire Port of San Antonio remained without power, CPS Energy spokesman Rolando Romero said.

Romero said strong winds brought down power lines, branches and trees early Thursday as a cold front moved into the area.

CPS Energy workers began repairs as soon as the storm passed, and “we restored most of the customers by 2 a.m.,” Romero said, but the scattered outages mounted.

“Crews have been on a roller coaster,” Romero said. “Our employees have their work cut out for them,” he said.

The airport outage began when three circuit-breakers were tripped around 11:50 a.m. amid strong winds, said airport spokesman Rich Johnson. After CPS Energy and the airport electricians worked on the problem, power was restored about 1:20 p.m., Johnson said.

“We assume it was because of the weather, the wind and rain,” he said.

During the outage, some airline workers had to manually issue boarding passes, Johnson said. Backup power enabled terminal workers to keep some security lanes open, and there was no major impact on flights, although severe weather in other cities caused some local delays.