NEW LONDON, Texas — Tuesday's powerful storm has left a lasting impact across East Texas.
"I was just thankful that it didn’t land on their house, nothing really got damaged besides maybe a dent in the truck," New London resident Katie Stephenson said.
Stephenson is one of about 19,000 SWEPCO customers in East Texas that were without power after Tuesday’s storms came through. The storm blew over a massive tree between her and her in-laws' houses.
"We both lost power, and we actually lost water because when the tree fell down it ripped up our whole waterline," Stephenson said.
SWEPCO spent the day attempting to fix that power outages by installing a new telephone poll on Phillips Street in New London to replace the one that had toppled over.
SWEPCO said that as of Wednesday morning, they had reduced the number of customers without power from 19,000 to less than 5,000.
"The majority of our customers have already been restored, but we’ll continue to grind away at those today and tomorrow," SWEPCO external affairs manager Mark Robinson said.
Robinson said that New London is one of the hardest hit areas across East Texas, but recovery efforts are chugging along, and that’s thanks in large part to the out-of-state help that SWEPCO has received from out of state.
"We couldn’t do what we do without mutual assistance. We just simply couldn’t. The restoration would take months as opposed to days. We all work on limited resources here, taking care of that blue sky day, you have a new home construction, those kinds of things. But when a storm comes like this, it’s all hands on deck. And just like we travel to help, other people will come and travel to help us here as well," Robinson said.
With the help of crews from Mississippi and Missouri, Robinson said that 95% of SWEPCO customers should be back online by Friday, and residents in New London really do appreciate their hard work.
"I mean just from what I’ve seen, they’ve been on it. I mean they were out here until late last night trying to get everything fixed, they were letting everyone know this is the time frame we’re looking at. They’ve been very attentive to let everybody know what’s going on," Stephenson said.