As nasty weather kept blowing in over Houston and surrounding areas, thousands of local residents had lost power to their homes as of Thursday afternoon.

According to CenterPoint Energy’s local outage tracker, 10,426 electricity customers were powerless across the greater Houston region as of 2:33 p.m. Thursday.

By 2:53 p.m. the number of local outages had dropped down to 7,614, but those residents who still have their lights on should be aware that local weather forecasts predict more potentially troublesome thunderstorms will be descending on our region throughout Thursday evening and over the next several days.

Customers who called the CenterPoint customer support and outage report hotline Thursday afternoon were greeted with a message that high call volumes meant they might not be able to get through to support staff.

CenterPoint spokeswoman Alejandra Diaz told the Houston Press that “the greater Houston area continues to be impacted by storms,” and that “CenterPoint Energy employees and contractors are working to assess storm damage to our electric grid and restore electricity to affected customers as safely and quickly as possible.”

Heavy showers and extremely loud thunderstorms struck Houston and surrounding regions overnight Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Space City Weather’s Eric Berger wrote that the threat of rain in the Houston area would dip temporarily after sunset that night, but warned Friday will likely bring more widespread bad weather.

“Friday begins the period of biggest concern for us with these rains,” Berger wrote, “and it will run through about Monday.”

“As is typical with this kind of system, it can be difficult to predict exactly when and where the heaviest rains are going to fall even a few hours beforehand,” Berger warned, which is why Berger and his fellow Space City forecaster Matt Lanza have put greater Houston under a Stage 1 flood warning through the weekend.