GALVESTON, Texas A barge crane working on the Galveston Causeway Bridge broke free sometime after 5 a.m. Thursday and drifted into a power line, causing a major outage on the island, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
At the height of the outage, an estimated 16,000 customers were affected, but CenterPoint crews went to work immediately, rerouting and restoring power.
City officials said the outage wasn t a big problem at UTMB, where emergency generators kicked in until power was restored.
Galveston ISD said only two schools were impacted, and their biggest issues were with computers and phones. Students weren t in class Thursday, because of parent-teacher conferences.
Our crews have gone out. We ve reset all of our traffic signals at this point. City Hall went to emergency power right away. Outages didn t cause any real hiccups as far as city operations go. But I m sure people waking up had a slower day in front of them, Alicia Cahill with the City of Galveston said.
CenterPoint officials said high winds and choppy water likely caused the accident, and reported that everything was back to normal by Thursday afternoon.
