MidSouth Electric nears complete restoration of outages, highlights year-round preparations

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (KBTX) – Nearly all MidSouth Electric Cooperative customers have had their power restored since Hurricane Beryl tore through Texas.

Over 30,000 of their 40,000 customers lost power this week due to high winds, downed trees and lightning. Vice President Justin Stapleton says to ensure a safe and fast response, the group is always preparing.

“It’s very important to prep every year. We have a standard emergency operations meeting that we conduct. Luckily that was just a couple of months ago so every person on the team goes through their part of the plan to make sure everything is fine-tuned and ready to go,” Stapleton said. “Everything from making sure we have damage assessment crews ready, right of way crews ready, journeymen, linemen ready to come in and assess the damage and do the repairs, even fuel deliveries.”

When the storm is coming in, MidSouth says they have crews following from behind. This way they can pull into a service area as the storm moves out and get working. Stapleton says crews know about the outages in various ways.

“We have a system that can alert us that there’s a power outage, the fiber internet infrastructure helps with that, helps interconnect our equipment so we’ll know faster, and then members can let us know they can send a text message, call us or go through the MidSouth app,” he said.

MidSouth covers 3,000 miles of power lines in rural and residential areas. This means running into downed trees, floods and bad infrastructure for large vehicles as they work to restore power.

Stapleton says this is why safety is the number one priority.

“Even during an outage restoration like this after a hurricane like Beryl, we have to send those folks home. It’s incredibly important that they stay safe, they stay focused and they go home to their families at the end of the night,” he said.

MidSouth expects to have power restored to every customer by 10 p.m. Thursday. Once customers have power restored, crews will work on making sure the lines and infrastructure are prepared for the next storm.