Ice accumulations on elevated surfaces are being blamed for knocking out power to thousands of North Texans Monday morning.
Ice formed on tree limbs, power lines and other eleveated surfaces as temperatures dipped below freezing while rain and some sleet fell in the area.
Unlike the roadways, which often hold a temperature above freezing, elevated surfaces can often get below the freezing point.
Automated electric monitoring systems are reporting over 27,000 customers without power at 10:30 a.m.
According to the automated outage information system for electric delivery provider Oncor, 24,767 customers were without power before 8 a.m. Monday morning. The largest hit area is in Tarrant County, where nearly 15,000 customers were without power at that time. Dallas County had over 3,000 customers without power while more than 1,900 were reportedly without power in Collin County.
At 10:30 a.m., those numbers had climbed to 21,000 in Tarrant County, 2,000 in Collin County, 2,000 in Johnson County while dropping to 1,900 in Dallas County.
At 3 p.m., outage numbers had dropped to just under 9,000 in Tarrant County, 359 in Dallas County, 14 in Collin County, 1,400 in Johnson County and 449 in Erath County.
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In Tarrant County, the Arlington Independent School District faced power outages at some of their campuses Monday. Power at Martin High School was out early during the school day Monday, but has been restored. Oncor workers are fixing partial outages at Bebensee Elementary and Farrell Elementary, plus power issues with Blanton Elementary.
The district said repairs at Arlington's Boles Junior High cannot be completed until after lunch. Due to this, absences at the school will be excused.
