A vehicle accident near the intersection of FM 1518 and Lower Seguin Road knocked out power to portions of southern Schertz overnight, leaving as many as 500 homes without air conditioning as temperatures across the region pushed past 100 degrees. The City of Schertz opened the community room at Fire Station 3 as an emergency cooling station for residents in the Crossvine subdivision and along Lower Seguin Road while crews worked to restore electricity.
According to the Schertz Police Department, the crash triggered a significant power restoration project in the immediate accident area, and CPS Energy estimated that up to 500 homes could be affected. The department said police, fire and EMS personnel were prepared to assist residents during the outage, and that some areas could see power restored sooner than others depending on the progress of repairs. Restoration was estimated to take two to four hours, though the timeline depended on how quickly crews could complete the work.
A Cooling Station Built for Exactly This Kind of Night
The 14,000-square-foot Fire Station 3, located at 11917 Lower Seguin Road, opened in November 2019 as part of an expansion meant to keep pace with rapid residential growth in southern Schertz, including the Crossvine, according to the City of Schertz. The station was built with a dedicated community meeting room intended for public gatherings and civic training that also doubles as emergency shelter space during events like cooling or warming relief, since Schertz civic facilities are frequently designed to serve dual purposes during localized emergencies.
That design meant officials could quickly pivot the space into a cooling shelter as temperatures climbed. The National Weather Service offices covering Austin and San Antonio reported high temperatures across South-Central Texas ranging from the mid-90s to over 100 degrees in mid-August, with heat index values reaching as high as 100 to 109 degrees — conditions that made a multi-hour outage far more dangerous for residents without air conditioning.
Officials Warn of Heat-Related Emergencies
The city urged residents to call 911 for heat-related emergencies, including overheating children or elderly people, heat-affected medical conditions, or reliance on powered medical equipment. Temperatures were described as very warm as the outage stretched into the night, and the city said it would provide additional updates as more information became available.
The Texas Division of Emergency Management maintains statewide protocols encouraging local municipalities to open public cooling centers and point residents toward 2-1-1 resources during severe summer heat interruptions, guidance meant to speed the activation of air-conditioned public spaces whenever outages overlap with dangerous heat. Schertz's move to open Fire Station 3's community room mirrors that state-level playbook.
A Familiar Flashpoint for Power Reliability in the Corridor
The FM 1518 and Lower Seguin Road corridor has drawn scrutiny over power reliability before. In October 2025, KSAT reported that residents in neighborhoods along that same corridor voiced frustration over recurring CPS Energy outages that damaged household electronics and spoiled food, with nearby subdivisions like Rhine Valley reporting frequent voltage drops and interruptions.
CPS Energy, the nation's largest municipally owned electric and gas utility, serves more than 840,000 customers across Greater San Antonio and surrounding suburban municipalities in Bexar and Guadalupe counties, including Schertz, per the Chamber Schertz-Cibolo-Selma Area. Emergency restoration procedures generally require crews to prioritize public safety hazards, such as downed lines from vehicle crashes, and high-capacity circuit repairs before addressing smaller neighborhood pockets, as Hoodline has previously reported — a protocol that helps explain why repairs following a vehicle-pole collision can take several hours while crews first confirm the site is safe with police and fire teams.
The crash site also sits along a stretch of road undergoing major infrastructure work. The City of Schertz has committed $18.2 million toward reconstructing Lower Seguin Road alongside Texas Department of Transportation expansion projects on FM 1518, aimed at handling traffic growth as development accelerates near Randolph Air Force Base. The Crossvine itself is a Texas-heritage style master-planned community off FM 1518 and Lower Seguin Road built out by companies including David Weekley Homes and Scott Felder Homes, and it has added hundreds of single-family homes to southern Schertz since construction began.
The Schertz Police Department also maintains Automated License Plate Reader cameras at the FM 1518 and Lower Seguin Road intersection as part of its traffic surveillance network, technology that could aid investigators piecing together the crash. No further details on the vehicle accident, including injuries or the driver involved, were included in the city's update as of the report.
