TV Station Loses Power as Meteorologist Is Warning of Rolling Blackouts

A local TV station in Texas temporarily lost power on Wednesday as a meteorologist was live on air, speaking about the possibility of rolling blackouts in the area due to extreme temperatures.

In a tweet, Travis Herzog, the chief meteorologist for KTRK-TV in Houston wrote, "That moment you're on live TV talking about the hot weather in Texas that could lead to rolling blackouts…and then the power goes out."

In the video, Herzog can be heard speaking about the increasingly high temperatures seen across numerous parts of Texas this week. Herzog then went on to speak about how the high temperatures create a "big draw" on the electricity demand, when the power for the station temporarily went down. "It looks like we may have just switched over to generator power, our lights just went out," Herzog said.

The incident on Wednesday came shortly after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called on Texans to conserve electricity from 2 to 9 p.m. local time, due to high temperatures.

"Today's conditions are expected to be similar to those experienced on Monday, July 11, 2022. On that day, Texans and businesses responded by voluntarily conserving electricity and helping ERCOT successfully meet record power demand by reducing their energy use by 500 MWs," ERCOT said in a statement on Wednesday. "The heat wave that has settled on Texas and much of the central United States is driving increased electric use. Other grid operators are operating under similar conservative operations programs as ERCOT due to the heatwave."

On Wednesday, the National Weather Service in Houston reported that the city tied the record for the highest temperature, dating back to 1980.

"With hazardous heat continuing across SE TX, we have yet another day with high temperature records to report. Today we observed a new daily high temperature record at College Station (106 degrees in 1901) and tied the record at Houston (102 degrees in 1980)," the National Weather Service in the city said in a tweet.

In a subsequent tweet, Herzog said that the power temporarily went out for a second time during his weather broadcast later on Wednesday.

"The weather video wall behind me and the rest of our production equipment are always on backup power, so here I am again as a silhouette on live TV," Herzog wrote.

Later on, Herzog further explained the incident on Twitter saying, "Mystery solved. One of our engineers informed me we went off the grid a little after 3PM. The studio lights aren't on a dedicated backup power source, so they went off as we switched generator power. Two hours later we went off generator and on the grid and the process repeated."

According to a map from PowerOutage.US, in Texas there are currently over 17,000 customers currently without power, across 12,559,678 customers tracked.

Herzog further told Newsweek that he was initially a "little spooked" when the power first cut out during his broadcast citing the conservation alert from ERCOT.

"I didn't really know what was going on or if we were even still broadcasting live, but I've learned over the years that you keep doing your job as if you're live until someone tells you otherwise!" Herzog told Newsweek. "I couldn't believe that it happened to me the second time—way to ruin an Emmy Award–winning weathercast in the making! RUINED! I decided to have a little more fun with it the second go around because what else can you do? It's live TV!"

Update 7/14/22, 2:47 p.m. ET: This story was updated with further comments from Travis Herzog.