HOUSTON — A new report released by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner's office points to a possible cause for the city-wide power outage that happened in November of last year.
A two-page preliminary report released by Saber Power Services, the company the city hired to investigate the outage, said "a fault in a high-voltage cable caused an increase in current upstream...which caused another cable to fail."
According to the report, this ultimately shut off power to the city's transformer which powers the East Water Purification Plant.
"The design of these switchgear configurations prevents switching the load from one bus to another without taking a power outage,' the investigation revealed.
Saber Power Services said a properly designed system will allow any electrical circuit to be removed from service that has a parallel source without ever losing power to the load, and will also restore service automatically from another source if power is lost.
Inspectors noted that the city's system has most of the parts needed to make an upgrade like that without a "major reconstruction."
Both the mayor's office and the city's public works department said they will comment when the final report is released.
You can check out the full report below:
