Two weeks later, a recounting of the storm

But this one dipped suddenly, and by 10 p.m. a storm with hurricane-force winds had swaggered its way into Austin and cut 52,000 customers from their power.

The weather that May 4, along with a series of harsh storms over the next four days, left the city in some disarray and has cost the city's utility at least $1.8 million in repairs and overtime wages.

In a City Hall postmortem Thursday, Austin Energy and city officials outlined the events that added up to — literally — a perfect storm. The winds, which reached 74 miles per hour, led (in utility parlance) to 2,300 points of failure on Austin's grid.

Though many residents may have been frightened to death by the lighting and loud thunder, no one actually died as a result of the weather.

But it did leave the city groping to deal with spoiled food in suddenly useless refrigerators and felled trees that had entangled power lines and sprawled across streets. There were about 300 crunched trees on a municipal golf course just before a major high school tournament. Thousands of minor repairs, many inaccessible by bucket truck, left utility workers engaged "in hand-to-hand combat" in backyards across the city, Mayor Will Wynn said.

"Armed with nothing more than a tool belt and a chainsaw, they worked their way hundreds of feet along back property lines," Wynn said.

On Thursday, the City Council approved a four-year, $1.2 million deal for CodeRED, a telephone notification system that can alert as many as 60,000 residents an hour about power outages, disasters and other emergencies.

The utility also suggested that the city buy laptops for field trucks to send localized data from around a disaster area and put together teams of city staff and volunteers to go door to door in badly hit neighborhoods.

At least three times over the weekend, Austin Energy officials announced deadlines when all customers could expect to see their power restored, only to see another storm roll over the city and the deadline slip by.

"It kind of blew our estimating methods out of the water," said Juan Garza, general manager for Austin Energy.

The damage caused by trees struck down by the winds inevitably cast more attention on the utility's tree-trimming policy.

Debate over the utility's policy, which calls for trimming away from lines across the city, had been largely confined to several well-to-do neighborhoods where residents had worried that their trees would be trimmed too severely. The neighborhood associations had managed to fashion a moratorium on the trimming from Austin Energy earlier this year.

Last week, a tree task force appointed as part of the moratorium deal concluded that the city should preserve as many trees as possible, establishing stiffer penalties for their destruction and providing more money for their cultivation.

The task force also suggested that the city explore putting the wires underground.

But that is a pricey proposition.

An Austin Energy project several years ago to put only 3 1/2 blocks' worth of power lines underground along East 11th Street cost $800,000, according to Cheryl Mele, who heads electric service delivery at the utility.

Garza, who said that more than 50 percent of Austin Energy's utility is underground already, all but torpedoed the idea:

"We understand the urban forest is one of the things that make Austin beautiful," he said. "But it would be very, very expensive." He said putting wires underground in the core of the city could run in the billions of dollars.

asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643