Flower Mound meets with Oncor about power outages

Flower Mound town staff and leaders met with Oncor employees this week to discuss frequent power outages and find out what has been causing them.

Shelly Willson, the town’s customer relations manager, said Mayor Steve Dixon and Town Manager Jimmy Stathatos attended the meeting, during which the town urged the energy provider to do more to prevent such outages in the future, before a widespread outage — caused by a switch gear that needed to be replaced — hit the middle of town on Wednesday, affecting about 3,500 residents.

Willson said that based on Oncor’s information, Flower Mound doesn’t seem to have many more outages than other places, but there is one thing that might explain why it seems like Flower Mound has more outages than it should.

“We do have more trees than most communities in the area, and trees interacting with power lines sometimes cause equipment failure,” Willson said.

Willson said outages can be caused by “a multitude of reasons,” including weather, trees, equipment failure and wildlife.

In the meeting with Oncor, Willson said the town “expressed we wanted to see more proactive maintenance on equipment, to be advised before tree trimming so we can notify residents and to see their plan to mitigate the frequency of outages. They agreed to do that.”