Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Demands Answers as Customers Remain Without Power After Beryl

DALLAS — With about 270,000 homes and businesses still without power in the Houston area nearly a week after Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he is demanding an investigation into the response of the utility company that serves the area and answers about its preparations for future storms.

“Gulf Coast energy companies need to be prepared for hurricanes, that’s clear,” Abbott said at his first news conference on Beryl since returning to the state from an economic development trip to Asia.

Although CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers since the storm struck July 8, the slow recovery has put the utility, which supplies electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city, under increasing scrutiny over whether it was adequately prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the scorching summer heat.

Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Texas Public Utilities Commission asking it to investigate why restoration took so long and what steps should be taken to fix it. In the Houston area, Beryl knocked down power lines, uprooted trees and snapped branches that hit power lines.

With hurricane season still a ways off, Abbott has given CenterPoint until the end of the month to outline what steps it plans to take to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He said the company will have to provide detailed plans for clearing vegetation that still threatens power lines.

Abbott also said CenterPoint did not have “a sufficient number of workers pre-staged” before the storm hit.

After Abbott’s press conference, CenterPoint said its top priority was “getting power back to the remaining impacted customers as safely and quickly as possible,” adding that by Monday the utility expected to have restored power to 90% of its customers. CenterPoint said it was committed to working with state and local leaders and conducting a “thorough review of our response.”

CenterPoint also said Sunday that it has been “investing for years” to strengthen the region’s resilience to such storms.

The power company defended its storm preparations and said it had brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It said it would have been dangerous to preposition those workers inside the storm’s expected impact zone before Beryl made landfall.

Brad Tutunjian, vice president of regulatory policy at CenterPoint Energy, said last week that extensive damage to trees and power poles was hampering the ability to quickly restore power.

A post Sunday on CenterPoint’s website by its president and CEO, Jason Wells, said more than 2,100 power poles were damaged during the storm and more than 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, impacting more than 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits.