SMITH COUNTY, Texas (KETK) — After the winter freeze passed through East Texas earlier this week, some residents are still without power as of Thursday night.

“The weather is getting better. It rained a lot today but some of that rain was good and melted the ice off the trees. If you drive around you can see a significant difference in the trees,” said Tom Trimble with Oncor.

An ongoing problem power crews are seeing is repeat tree damage, many times in the same location they just cleared.

“The tree trimmers have cut all the trees back. We’ve gone back out there to make that line and power that line back up and as soon as we did, we found out that in 30 minutes span we have a tree fall on the line,” said Trimble.

 Team members have increased from eight-hour days to 16-hour days.

“We have over a thousand people coming in from mutual assistance from Alabama and neighboring utilities from the state,” said Trimble. “We are gonna put as many people as we can on these outages to try and get everybody back on.”

Oncor advises that if you’ve been without power for over 24 hours, to keep reporting your outage and t o not assume your neighbor did.

“We are gonna work through the night, we are gonna work through the day tomorrow, tomorrow night and Saturday if we have to,” said Trimble.