Storms leave thousands without power across Jim Wells County area
More than 3,000 customers lost power across Jim Wells and neighboring counties as residents were urged to stock emergency kits before hurricane season begins June 1.
Storm-driven outages spread across Jim Wells County and the wider Coastal Bend on Thursday morning, leaving more than 3,000 customers without electricity across Jim Wells, Kleberg, Nueces and Aransas counties as another round of storms swept through South Texas. AEP Texas outage reports showed the disruption stretching from Alice to Corpus Christi, with a separate local report placing the utility’s total at about 13,700 customers out of service by 8:15 a.m., including about 2,300 in the Alice area, 1,500 in Aransas Pass and 7,300 in Corpus Christi.
Many of those interruptions were restored by the afternoon, but the timing landed on the doorstep of hurricane season. The Texas Division of Emergency Management says the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through November 30, and AEP Texas uses the same dates to remind customers that this is the window when preparation matters most. NOAA reinforced that warning on Thursday by forecasting a below-normal Atlantic season, but coastal Texas still faces the same threat from power loss, wind and flooding whenever a storm tracks inland.
AEP Texas said it had positioned more than 250 linemen across its service territory before the storms arrived, part of the utility’s standard practice of moving crews closer to likely trouble spots ahead of tropical weather. The company has used similar pre-staging before storms in the Corpus Christi area, a sign that restoration efforts across the region are built around speed once outages begin. For Jim Wells County households, that matters because the first hours without power can mean spoiled food, interrupted work, dark intersections and medical equipment that depends on steady electricity.
Local history has already shown how quickly severe weather can strain the county. Jim Wells County set up a resource information center in Alice for residents affected by severe weather last year, and the county later moved into a recovery phase after a May 8 wind event that caused widespread outages, downed poles and debris-blocked roads. Those episodes offer a clear lesson: the next storm can bring the same problems back with little warning.
That is why household preparation should happen now, before the first Gulf system takes shape. Ready.gov recommends a disaster kit that includes water, non-perishable food, a first aid kit, cash, prescription medicines, extra batteries or another power source, a battery-powered or hand-cranked radio, flashlights and a manual can opener. In practical terms, Jim Wells County families should plan for supplies that can last several days, with enough water, food and medication to get through a prolonged outage if the next round of storms is stronger than Thursday’s.
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