Power restored in Galveston after widespread outage

GALVESTON, TX Alicia Cahill with the City of Galveston told Eyewitness News that a crane on a barge working on the old causeway bridge hit, but didn't sever, a transmission line, blowing power to 54 percent of the island. More than 16,000 homes and businesses were without electricity. CenterPoint Energy worked to re-route power.

Cahill said normally the power could have been re-routed but a CenterPoint substation nearby that would have been used in this case is in the process of being elevated to make it less vulnerable to hurricanes after it got hit by Ike, so it was out of service.

She also said the outage affected a number of street lights and caused small fires at power poles, but none of the fires spread. No emergency services were said to be affected.

A spokesperson with Galveston ISD said a couple of schools including KIPP Coastal Academy and Parker Elementary, as well as the GISD administration building briefly lost power. Power has since been restored, and no major disruptions in the schools were reported.

Cahill told us power was restored to all customers around 1pm Thursday afternoon.