A car slammed into a utility pole near Montana and Tierra Este in Far East El Paso early Sunday, knocking out power to nearly 2,000 customers in the middle of the night. El Paso Electric said crews were working to restore service quickly as residents in the area woke up or stayed up without electricity.
The outage began at 1:19 a.m. Sunday, according to El Paso Electric's website, and left 1,987 people without power, as reported by KVIA. Residences near Montana and Tierra Este bore the brunt of the outage, and the outlet attributed the cause directly to the collision, citing the utility: the outage was caused by a car hitting a pole near Montana and Tierra Este. El Paso Electric initially estimated that power would be restored by 4 a.m.
Separate outage-tracking data from Poweroutage.us confirmed the same customer count, reporting that 1,987 homes and businesses were without power across the El Paso Electric service area. That figure, the site noted, represented just 0.41% of the 483,601 El Paso Electric customers it tracks — a small slice of the utility's overall footprint, but still enough to leave an entire overnight pocket of Far East El Paso in the dark.
Crews Restore Most Service Within Hours
By 2:30 a.m., the situation had largely turned around. A majority of customers had been restored power, with only six customers still waiting on El Paso Electric crews to finish the job, per the same KVIA report. The rapid turnaround suggests crews moved quickly once the damaged pole was identified, though the outlet's account did not confirm whether the original 4 a.m. target was ultimately met for those final six households.
Pattern of Pole Strikes Across the Area
Sunday's crash adds to a string of recent vehicle-related power disruptions around Far East and East El Paso. A semi-truck collision at 11751 Gateway West knocked out power to 2,140 customers after striking one of El Paso Electric's transmission poles near Gateway West and Lee Trevino, with the utility estimating at the time that repairs would take 45 minutes to an hour, according to KFOX14.
A separate Friday afternoon outage left 3,088 customers without power near Rich Beem and Montwood and North Zaragoza Road near Tierra Este, the station also reported, with El Paso Electric sending crews to investigate and initially expecting restoration by 7 p.m. That same report noted two El Paso Electric employees were injured after an arc flash was reported at a substation in the area on April 15. And in a 2023 incident, a single-vehicle rollover damaged an electric pole in the 9900 block of Montana near the Dairy Queen; fire officials said no one was injured, and El Paso Electric crews went to the scene to fix the pole, though the utility's website showed no outages in the area at that time, per KVIA's earlier coverage.
El Paso Electric has not released additional details beyond confirming crews were dispatched quickly once Sunday's outage was reported. The story remains a developing one as the utility works through repairs across its Far East El Paso service territory.
