Hurricane Beryl triggers new power outages in Houston as thousands remain in the dark for a week

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — CenterPoint Energy surpassed 200,000 power outages Monday afternoon. The company expects to have 90% of its 2.2 million affected customers back online by the end of the day, a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Houston.

The same thing happened for many families in the seven days since the storm, with households increasingly impatient with their lights and air conditioning being left off.

ABC13 viewers told Eyewitness News that Houston’s Third Ward is one of those neighborhoods.

On the CenterPoint Outage Tracking, The company considers the area to be live with potential localized outages, otherwise classified as nested outages.

The term should sound familiar to you. Eyewitness News recently reported this after May’s derecho when CenterPoint had three times fewer outages than Beryl.

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Much like the May report, CenterPoint Energy explained what’s happening in a statement Monday:

“There are several reasons why some customers may have their power restored while others nearby are still without power. One reason may be a “nested outage.” A nested outage occurs when, even after the primary problem is resolved, other isolated issues, such as damage to fuses, transformers, meters, power lines, or other electrical infrastructure, cause continued outages in specific areas. These secondary issues can be caused by unseen damage or overloaded systems.

Another reason could be that customers on the same street or neighborhood may be connected to different electrical circuits. Customers on different circuits may experience different restoration times because each circuit may have different levels of damage or may be repaired in a different sequence. This means that even if one circuit is fully restored, another may still be in the process of being repaired.

The restoration map reflects an outage at the circuit level. Therefore, a customer who is still down on a circuit that is displaying a green light may be experiencing a more localized problem. Customers enrolled in the Power Alert service receive individual restoration alerts as their power is restored. We continue to evaluate our system and update the information regularly.

A circuit outage typically affects locations where more than 100 customers are affected. If your grocery stores, streetlights, and surrounding neighborhoods are without power, the problem may be with the circuit.

CenterPoint said it was sending 14,000 crew members to work 16-hour shifts on the restoration.

“These crews have traversed more than 8,500 miles of power lines, removed nearly 19,000 weakened trees impacting the lines, repaired or replaced more than 2,100 poles and deployed 28 mobile generating units to temporarily restore cooling centers, hospitals, senior living communities and water treatment plants,” the company said.

Despite the efforts, CenterPoint officials have yet to say when the lights are expected to be turned back on for those still in the dark. Eyewitness News is awaiting a response on a reliable timeline.

However, some ABC13 viewers said the company told them electricity would remain available. on leave until Friday.

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