HOUSTON — Wind from the arctic blast knocked power from thousands of Houston homes leaving them in the cold for hours overnight on Thursday, according to CenterPoint Energy.
The work to restore power continued Friday with the cold air expected to stick around the Houston area for a few more days.
People who lost power were left wondering when things would get back to normal.
CenterPoint Energy said crews were fully staffed and worked to address outages.
Power outages: A look at outages across the Houston area and Texas
Folks in the Songwood neighborhood were without power for more than 16 hours, beginning around 6 p.m. Thursday evening.
Throughout the deep freeze, families had to bundle up with blankets, jackets and even pets.
“I felt like we were in the freezer, it was really really cold, you could see our breath when we talked — had to bring my dog with me. She was shivering,” Houstonian Alexia Garcia said.
As of Friday night, Houston is only experiencing isolated power outages, nothing out of the ordinary.
CenterPoint issued the following statement on outages in the Houston area:
'CenterPoint Energy’s Houston electric system is currently experiencing isolated outages across our service territory as a result of strong winds associated with the arctic front impacting our area. We are fully staffed with skilled crews working to assess damage and restore service across our service territory.
'We are committed to restoring service to impacted customers as safely and quickly as possible. We appreciate our customers’ patience.
'For more information and safety tips:
- Sign up for Power Alert Service for information on individual outages.
- Follow @cnpalerts and visit Outage Tracker for general outage locations.
- Visit CenterPointEnergy.com/StormCenter for electric and natural gas safety tips and other resources.'