Power outages caused some issues for some Houston area families preparing Thanksgiving meals.
People along Hill Country Drive near Conroe said they spent most of the daytime on Thursday without power.
“I was mad all day,” said resident Mike Wahrenberger. “Frustrated and mad.”
Wahrenberger wasn’t holding back about the impact the outage had on his family’s plans for an afternoon meal on Thanksgiving.
“It flickered on and off actually a couple of times, you know, no more than a minute,” Wahrenberger said. “Long enough to get your hopes up and start trying to salvage anything you had left or we start prepping again and it was just... it ended up going out and ruining everything so we just threw everything out.”
So what did they do instead?
“We went to Denny’s,” he said.
Entergy told KPRC 2 lightning damaged some equipment in the area. Neighbors said the power was restored around 5:15 p.m.
Other families were also dealing with power problems on the holiday.
“I thought, ‘oh my gosh! We’re 40 minutes into a five-hour cook with this turkey so how are we going to finish this?’” said Frank Essig, a homeowner who lives near Spring.
Essig said the lights went out around 10:40 a.m. after he had already loaded the turkey into the oven. Luckily, he has a generator and the bird was saved. Essig ended up inviting over some other neighbors who were without power.
He called the outage a big inconvenience.
“The worst day you could think of to [have] something like this happening, but we just said, ‘let’s be thankful that we’re all here, we’re all healthy, we’re blessed to be together and be able to celebrate this wonderful holiday,’” Essig said.
CenterPoint Energy said strong winds came through the area in the morning, knocking off two primary lines.
Essig got word that his power was restored around 4:45 p.m.