Texas City refineries and residents were without power for several hours Friday morning, most likely due to a broken insulator on a high voltage power line leading to a short circuit.
The outage occurred at about 2 a.m. Friday, according to Cathy Garber, a spokeswoman for Texas-New Mexico Power, which owns and operates the power grid in that area.
The outage affected essentially the entire city — about 13,500 customers in Texas City and LaMarque and a handful of industrial customers, including refineries and chemical plants owned by Marathon, Valero and BP.
Bruce Clawson, Texas City’s Homeland Security Coordinator, told the Chronicle flares went off at several refineries but that the city did not declare an emergency alert or issue a shelter-in-place order.
Crews began restoring power by 3:15 a.m. with all residential customers restored by 4 a.m. The commercial customers took longer.
Later, at 7:23 a.m., another 3,177 customers in Texas City and LaMarque lost power due to a blown lightning arrestor at a transformer, Garber said. Power was restored by 8:10 a.m.
It’s not clear if that incident was somehow related to the earlier outage, she said.
Valero spokesman Bill Day said power has been restored to all production units at the Valero Texas City Refinery and the restart process is under way. There has been some flaring as the units restart, he said.
A BP official said there was some flaring but that the impact on operations was minimal and the facilities were back up and running later Friday morning.
Flares at refineries are used to burn off dangerous vapors
Texas City refineries were hit by several power outages in late April when a build-up of salt, soot and other debris that is normally washed away by rainfall turned power line insulators into conductors.
TNMP and CenterPoint Energy, which runs the power lines in most of the Houston area, have been spraying insulators with high-pressure water cannons to removed the debris. TNMP was also coating them with silicon to help prevent the problem in the future.
