Storms Bring High Winds, Hail, Phone Outages
NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) - An early morning storm system hit North Texas Saturday, bringing with it heavy rain, and hail and in Arlington and Grand Prairie, phone outages across parts of both cities.
There were no reports of damage, but Grand Prairie Police and Arlington police said that AT&T lost power at one of its offices, causing service disruptions for thousands of customers.
"Early this morning, some AT&T customers in the Arlington area may have intermittently experienced an issue with wire-line or wireless services for a short time after commercial power was lost in one of our central offices," said AT&T spokesman Charles Bassett. "Technicians quickly worked to activate back-up power, and service is currently running normally. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers."
In Arlington, the outage stretched generally from the southeast city limits west to Park Springs and north to Timberview. In Grand Prairie, the problems were reported south of Camp Wisdom Road.
Extra patrols were put out on the street in the affected area, Arlington Police reported via their Twitter account.
Hail blanketed the ground in several cities including Mansfield, Arlington and Cedar Hill.
"The hail storm was triggered from fast-moving upper level energy moving over a stationary front well south of North Texas," said CBS 11 Meteorologist Garry Seith. "This meant the storm was able to overcome an atmosphere that was mostly capped or stable. The cold profile of our atmosphere supported hail that trended on the smaller side, but there was a fairly large volume of it in places."
Oncor reported less than 400 customers without power as of 9 a..m.
By noon, phone service had been restored in Arlington and the extra patrols ended, Arlington Police Sgt. Chris Cook said.
