East Austin power outage caused by sensor which prevented 'catastrophic damage', AE says

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- On what is likely to be the hottest day of the year, thousands of people in east Austin came home from work Wednesday to find they had no power. In all, Austin Energy estimates the outage impacted roughly 7,000 people.

One of those people was Issac Caballero, a teacher, who returned home to no air conditioning.

"As a teacher, I was hoping to come home and get into my AC," Caballero said. "We've experienced it all summer, just not as long as yesterday."

The outage started around 5 p.m. Wednesday and lasted until around 9 p.m., Austin Energy said. A sensor caused the outage -- but Austin Energy says it also protected against "catastrophic damage."

"Each substation is equipped with protective systems -- and they work similar to how you would have one in your house, a fuse, a breaker box, something along those lines -- when too much current is being pulled into a piece of equipment, those sensors are designed to take that offline so that it doesn't cause catastrophic damage and that's what happened in this substation," Matt Mitchell with Austin Energy explained.

Austin Energy said the high load was likely due to heat -- as folks worked to cool their homes.

"Our substation team and our engineers worked to reset the sensors so that it will accommodate a higher energy load while still operating safely and so we don't anticipate that being an issue again," Mitchell said.