Single mom shares experience of 4 days in the dark
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Ellyse Espinosa is a single mother and business owner. She's one of thousands who remained in the dark for yet another night.
"Four days straight, no power, no water," she said.
Just like everyone else, Monday morning was a fun snow day, as she and her family played outside and enjoyed the Houston snow.
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"I think it didn't get real until we lost power," she said. "We were like 'Ok, it's going to come back', but it never did."
By Friday morning, ERCOT, the Texas electric grid manager, was still under a level 3 alert and asked consumers to continue to conserve energy if they had power, though officials reported there were no added outages overnight Thursday.
According to poweroutage.us, more than 187,000 customers were still without electricity Friday morning in the state. The largest impacts were in east Texas counties, including Nacogdoches and Angelina Counties.
CenterPoint Energy reported just over 3,900 customers were still in the dark in the Houston area on Friday. Entergy reported just under 2,800 customers were without power.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday that the remaining power outages were not due to a lack of generation like earlier in the week. Instead, the outages were because of other issues like downed lines.
"Every available repair truck has been dispatched to repair those downed power lines," said Abbott.
CenterPoint Energy officials said Thursday crews restored approximately 1.3 million customers in a 24-hour period.
Ellyse and her 7-year-old, Arian Lukas, have been taking this entire situation in stride, even helping her neighbors with burst pipes and more.
"(We're) just trying to do what we can and try to stay positive," she said. "I think if we're just frustrated about the situation, it's not going to turn the lights on."
