San Antonio Storm Knocks Out Power to 100,000, Flips Trailer at Heroes Stadium

Severe thunderstorms tore through San Antonio late Friday night, cutting power to more than 100,000 CPS Energy customers, flooding roadways and overturning an 18-wheeler and a high school band equipment trailer at Heroes Stadium. Wind gusts topped 60 mph in spots, downed trees, and damaged gas stations across the city as the storm system moved through in a matter of hours.

At the peak of the outages, CPS Energy recorded 103,957 customers without power across 556 active outages, a stunning jump from roughly 33,400 customers just an hour earlier, according to MySA. The two hardest-hit ZIP codes were both on San Antonio's Westside, with 78207 seeing more than 15,000 residents affected and 78237 topping 9,000, per the same outlet's reporting.

Meteorologist Joe DeCarlo, writing for KABB, reported that the thunderstorms moved through San Antonio late Friday night carrying gusty winds and heavy rain that triggered flash flooding across the region. Winds gusted near 50 mph at the New Braunfels Airport, the station noted, while the storm's heaviest bands dumped 2 to 5 inches of rain in under an hour, prompting the National Weather Service in Austin/San Antonio to issue a Flash Flood Warning for Bexar County effective through 12:15 a.m. Saturday.

Trailer and 18-Wheeler Flipped at Heroes Stadium

The storm's most dramatic scene played out at Heroes Stadium, where Johnson High School was hosting Judson High School for their season-opening football game. Wind gusts exceeding 60 mph overturned a Johnson High School band equipment trailer at the stadium, damaging it, though no students were injured, according to KENS 5. The same gusts also flipped an 18-wheeler at the stadium, per KABB's reporting, and San Antonio resident Ann Fogel shared a photo from the scene showing the damage.

The chaos forced school district officials to cancel multiple Week 1 varsity football games across the metro area on Friday, including the Judson-Johnson matchup and a Southwest High School game, with buses deployed to get students safely back to their campuses, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Opening night of high school football is typically one of the biggest Friday-night draws in South Texas communities, making the mass cancellations a rare disruption to a fall ritual.

A Second Straight Night of Storm Damage

Friday's storm followed a separate outbreak just a night earlier, when pop-up thunderstorms knocked out power to more than 5,200 CPS Energy customers on San Antonio's far Northwest Side, as Hoodline reported in its prior coverage of Thursday's outages. Triple-digit heat index values earlier in the week had built up the atmospheric instability that fueled both nights of storms.

The back-to-back outages arrive as CPS Energy works through a five-year, $6.2 billion capital improvement plan, with roughly 52 percent of that spending earmarked for electric distribution and system infrastructure meant to harden the grid against storm damage. The utility, the nation's largest municipally owned electric and gas provider, is pursuing that hardening effort even as it faces mounting legal and political pressure: a Bexar County judge ordered CPS Energy in July to pay nearly $400 million in unpaid natural gas charges, interest and legal fees tied to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott called this month for breaking up the utility's public monopoly, describing its rates as “taxation” and pushing for retail electricity competition.

Weekend Forecast Turns Hot and Mostly Sunny

Despite the overnight chaos, KABB's forecast calls for Saturday to be mostly sunny and hot, with highs between 97 and 101 degrees and southeast winds of 5 to 10 mph, along with only a slight chance of a sea-breeze shower or storm in far eastern counties. Sunday's outlook looks nearly identical, with highs again reaching 97 to 101 degrees, southeast winds of 5 to 10 mph, and the same slim chance of an isolated shower along the coast.

City crews routinely barricade more than 20 low-water crossings across Bexar County during major summer storm events to enforce “Turn Around, Don't Drown” safety protocols, a standard emergency response Hoodline detailed in its coverage of a July flood watch. With CPS Energy crews still working through repairs from consecutive nights of storm damage, residents on the Westside and beyond were left waiting for power to be restored as the weekend's dry, scorching heat set in.