Beryl ‘more heavily impacted’ Houston than anticipated

Hurricane Beryl “more heavily impacted” Houston’s electric infrastructure than originally anticipated, the area’s primary electricity provider said Monday in an afternoon press release. 

The Cat 1 hurricane led to widespread outages affecting more than 2.26 million customers across the Houston metro area, according to the utility’s website.

CenterPoint did not provide a timeline for service restoration in the press release, saying its crews are still assessing the damage sustained by its electric systems during the storm. Beryl pummeled Houston early Monday, causing widespread flooding, infrastructure damage and at least four deaths. 

While customers along unimpacted systems may see power restored quickly, others in harder-hit areas “may experience prolonged outages and should prepare accordingly,” the company said. CenterPoint did not identify which areas should expect to remain without power.

CenterPoint said it would release general restoration estimates once the damage assessment is complete, with “more granular service restoration times” coming later. 

“We are mobilizing all of our available resources, as well as mutual assistance resources from other utility companies, to begin the process of quickly and safely restoring power to our customers,” said Lynnae Wilson, a senior vice president at CenterPoint, in the press release. “We understand how difficult it is to be without power for any amount of time, especially in the heat. We are laser focused on the important and time-sensitive work that lies ahead.”

Seven thousand partner crews were en route to Houston to aid CenterPoint’s 3,000 local employees as of Monday afternoon, said Paul Lock, the company’s manager of local government relations, at an afternoon press conference. 

Lock indicated that the company expects a clearer picture of the restoration timeline to emerge sometime Tuesday. 

CenterPoint outage tracker still not available

As CenterPoint works to restore service to the region, the millions of Houstonians without power continue to lack a critical resource for tracking electrical outages and restoration timelines: CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker.

The Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area highlighting areas affected by outages, has been offline since May due to “technical difficulties” caused by the derecho that swept through Harris County that month, CenterPoint officials said.

On Sunday, a CenterPoint representative said the company would replace the Outage Tracker with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July. In the meantime, the company pointed to its Storm Center, which updates general outage information every fifteen minutes, and its Power Alert service, which provides community-specific restoration information via text, email or phone. 

But the lack of clarity around the extent of power outages and restoration timelines caused consternation among CenterPoint customers eager for updates after the derecho. 

CenterPoint maintains the systems that deliver power to nearly all residents of Harris and Fort Bend counties, along with some other corners of Greater Houston. In total, about 2.8 million Houstonians rely on CenterPoint, according to the company.

CenterPoint has long contended with major weather events resulting in widespread outages. Hurricane Ike, a Cat 2 storm that battered Greater Houston in 2008, resulted in power outages to nearly 2.2 million CenterPoint customers. Some were still without electricity nearly two weeks later. 

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