AUSTIN, Texas —  It’s an outage outrage.

One week has passed since nearly 400,000 people in Central Texas lost power. The community is calling for accountability from the city and utility companies. As of Tuesday evening, more than 3,000 customers were without power. That was down from more than 9,000 earlier in the day.

Spectrum News sat down with Austin Energy spokesperson Matt Mitchell to get some answers.

“What is it that’s taking place to make sure when that storm hits, you are ready to go?

“There was lots of weatherizing, there was lots of preparation in terms of getting our supplies ready and our crews lined up. We have plants in place to deal with this,” Mitchell said. “But the ice accumulation made this something that was unprecedented in our experience.”

“I asked our meteorologists about this. They said a week prior they were all saying this is going to be a serious ice event, and in fact, this isn’t unprecedented. It’s happened numerous times in the past. The most recent one was 2007, there was an ice over that was even worse than this storm.”

“Well I can say that it’s historic, certainly,” Mitchell said. “2007 Austin was not 2023 Austin, we didn’t have the same number of people and we didn’t have the same energy infrastructure.”

“I lived in Florida, we had hurricanes, we would always go with, let’s assume it’s a category five, and if it’s not, then we’re good to go. Why is that not what the city is doing?”

“I can’t speak to that, specifically, I really can’t,” Mitchell said. “What I can say in based on the information we had, we had a plan in place well in advance, we had staffing ready and we had equipment ready, but what was forecast was not what was materializing.”

“If there’s trees on your property, you’re supposed to maintain them, but as far as the actual jurisdiction around power lines, that is Austin Energy’s responsibly?”

“Yes, yes, into the easement, yes,” Mitchell said. “We have that 15-foot perimeter that is something that is Austin Energy’s, that’s our, ... we have that ability to go in and trim and that responsibility to go back in and trim.”

“Do you think the way Austin Energy responded to this storm was adequate?”

“It’s not for me to say what I think and don’t think,” Mitchell said. “What I can say is that Austin Energy and our partners with the city are responding now and have continued to respond since the beginning of the storm to restore power as safely and quickly as possible.”

“If you have someone sitting in my chair right now who’s been without power for more than a week, has kids, and have been unable to get to a shelter, and they hear, ‘Oh, it was Mother Nature. We could’t avoid it, we couldn’t prevent anything, we did what we could,’ I’m guessing they aren’t going to take as an answer.”

“I think they can have every right to be frustrated, just as the utility is,” Mitchell said. “Again, we would like to be making all these power restorations as fast as we can.”

“We can talk about tree trimming, we can talk about protocols and ordinances and all of those things, and make better communication plans and all of those things, but at the same time, there are 34 million trees in Central Texas that all got at least a half an inch of ice,” Mitchell said. “That’s like dropping a Ford F150 Super Duty on each one of them.

“These outages have gone on longer than in 2021 and I know you don’t like to compare, but everyone looks at that storm and says, that was way worse, that was a grid outage, here we got some trees down, why is it going to take another week to restore power?”

“We had 350,000 people over the course of the last week who lost power, thousands of different outages, and every single one was different,” Mitchell said. “Whereas with Uri, it was circuitry issue, it was supply issue, we didn’t see the damage to infrastructure on this level.”

Spectrum News requested data from Austin Energy, but Mitchell says they won’t have that information until after they resume power to the community.

We dug into public data on the city’s website and Austin Energy’s outage maps to find out what ZIP codes had the highest number of outages as of Monday night.

We found out of the more than 9,000 customers without power. These were the ZIP codes with the top 10 highest outages

1. 78757- 2,165
2. 78729 - 1,357
3. 78758 - 1,244
4. 78746 - 1,160
5. 78759 - 1,120
6. 78731 - 1,078
7. 78745 - 1,064
8. 78703 - 730
9. 78723 - 700
10. 78717- 642

Using the data we gathered from the outage maps, we created a map to show the areas were the most outages were. Most were in Central and East Austin.

We also looked through Austin Energy’s outage map to see what the main causes of each outage were. Most of the outages didn’t have a cause listed, but “tree branch contacted power lines” and “electrical equipment failure” were listed the most.

Mitchell confirmed that trees falling on power lines was the number one cause of most the outages in the service area.

Are you still without power? Let us know. Email Jamil.Donith@charter.com