Welcome to Water and Power, a newsletter about the elements of our survival—and those who seek to profit off them. Water & Power delivers unique reporting to prepare you to engage on the issues dear to your heart, including notices of upcoming events and highlights from across the media landscape.
If you know someone who would appreciate this research and analysis, pass it along. Subscribe to this and our growing roster of Deceleration newsletters. Paying supports from the $5/month level up may leave a comment below. Reader support makes this work possible.
— Greg Harman
There was no warning that a series of “popcorn storms,” rainstorms popping up here and there across the region, could evolve so quickly into bursts of winds over 80 and 90 mph raging across San Antonio late last month. Official warnings about what one meteorologist later termed “one of San Antonio's more significant wind events of the summer” came only after the winds and rain were already driving.
These severe straight-line winds on Friday, August 28, 2026, roared from the northeast to the southwest, their most severe aspects just skirting downtown proper. Power lines were downed. A semi-tractor-trailer flipped. Transformers torched. Roofs pried apart. Street signs wrapped in debris and snapped to the ground. Traffic lights dimmed as large sections of the city went dark.
While the first communications from CPS Energy noted a little over 100,000 were without power, the full number actually exceeded 300,000 on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026.
With little time to notify unhoused residents, two people are now known to have perished in the storm, swept along in sudden floodwaters. But recent investments in electrical infrastructure made after the devastating winter storm of 2021 contained what could have been a much bigger outage.
“Since Winter Storm Uri, we’ve invested $70 million in equipment called reclosers,” acting CPS Energy CEO Frank Almaraz told utility board members on Aug. 31, 2026, at their first meeting post-storm.
“Whereas otherwise a circuit would say open and a customer would be out, that equipment allows the circuit to close and bring those customers back.”
Instead of the city waking up on Saturday morning to 325,000 customers out of power, the number was roughly 112,000, he said.
It is unclear, however, where these reclosers were installed. Deceleration has requested this information but not received an answer by our publication deadline today.
Impacts on the West Side
What is known is that the bulk of the outages centered in some of the city’s most economically marginalized communities around Five Points and the near-West Side. For many families here, packing up for a hotel wasn’t an option. They faced days of subsequent 100-degree temps without cooling or refrigeration—many grilling whatever had been stocked in their freezers rather than face spoilage.
Surveying the community on Saturday with streets full of debris and an estimated 60,000 still without power, Deceleration found Susana Segura on the West Side off Castroville Road. The trunk on her small white economy car popped with more than 100 bagged meals inside. It was a donation from Al Carbon Pollos Asados off Culebra Road, which had itself moved operations from its darkened brick-and-mortar to a food truck on site.
“People need help. There’s a lot of elderly people with trees down,” Segura told Deceleration. “We need people to come together and bring their saws and bring their trucks and their trailers, and not try to gouge people that don’t have money. This is the poorest ZIP Code in the city.”
“Of course we don’t have any traffic lights,” she observed, a fact that would mark the West Side for days to come, contributing to start-and-stop congestion and at least one traffic accident we witnessed.
The otherwise empty lot beside us that day was filled with camping and household supplies—the razed home Segura described as a victim of overly aggressive code enforcement. Though the house has been leveled and removed, displaced local residents still come to this spot to collect their belongings.
As some of those previously displaced walked by quietly to pick up a bag, Segura added: “It’s the neighborhood they grew up in. It’s all they know.”
Staying cool for these residents is more challenging than navigating the multi-day shock that stranded tens of thousands across the city in a stroke. For them, summertime is a life-threatening reality potentially stretching from super-heated spring days to summer temps that often linger well into the fall.
Since 1970, the average temps in San Antonio have increased nearly 4 degrees, according to data maintained by Climate Central, while rising humidity levels have resulted in 22 more days each year with a heat index over 90 degrees.
