A Texas A&M expert says that Hurricane Harvey could leave over a million Texans without power.
"Our model is forecasting that a significant number of utility customers along the Middle Texas coast and South Central Texas, including Corpus Christi, San Antonio and Victoria will experience outages," said Dr. Brent McRoberts of the Department of Geography in the College of Geosciences at A&M.
The hurricane upgraded to a Category 3 Friday afternoon with wind speeds of 120 miles per hour.
“Power outages are often highly correlated with wind speed,” McRoberts said.“Typically, hurricane-related outages are caused by downed power lines, which result from strong winds or trees getting entangled with the lines."
McRoberts and a research team use the Spatially Generalized Hurricane Outage Prediction Model to estimate outages based on hurricane data, such as the storm's eye location, wind speed, duration and more.
Texas utility companies use the research to prepare for tropical storms and hurricanes.
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