Houston utility says 500,000 customers still without power next week as Beryl outages persist – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

An official with Houston’s largest electric company said Thursday that about 500,000 customers will still be without power next week as widespread outages caused by Hurricane Beryl persist and frustration mounts over the pace of restoration.

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall Monday. The company hopes hundreds of thousands more customers will be able to get back online in the coming days, but others will have to wait much longer, he said.

“We know we have a lot more work to do,” Ryan said at a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulator. “We’re not going to stop until it’s done.”

Ryan predicted that extended outages through next week would be concentrated along the Texas coast, closer to where Beryl made landfall.

At a news conference Thursday in Houston, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said it was “unacceptable” that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm. Patrick, who is serving as acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip, has promised a state investigation into the storm’s response. Abbott has also called for an investigation.

“We’re still going to have big storms in this area. (…) We need to make sure people were prepared the way they should have been,” Patrick said. “It’s a terrible situation for people who are experiencing this heat.”

Ryan predicted that extended outages through next week would be concentrated along the Texas coast, closer to where Beryl made landfall.

The Category 1 hurricane, the weakest type, knocked out power to about 2.7 million customers after making landfall in Texas on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.

CenterPoint Energy has struggled to restore power to affected customers, who are frustrated that a relatively small storm could cause such disruptions at the height of summer.

Area residents complained that utilities, state and city officials were unprepared for the storm, that the restoration process was slow and that CenterPoint’s online map, which is supposed to show where power is restored, was woefully inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods as restored when they were still without power.

The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it had mobilized to help rebuild were not in Houston when the storm hit. Early forecasts called for the storm to make landfall much farther south, along the Gulf Coast near the Texas-Mexico border, before heading toward Houston.

Ryan said falling trees and tree limbs caused most of the outages, and workers had to conduct damage assessments on more than 8,500 miles of power lines.

Beryl has been blamed for at least eight deaths in the United States, one in Louisiana, one in Vermont and six in Texas. Eleven other deaths have been recorded in the Caribbean.

However, the storm’s lingering impact for many Texas residents was the power outage that left much of the nation’s fourth-largest city sweltering days later in hot, humid conditions that the National Weather Service deemed potentially dangerous.

“They thought maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, but it had a huge impact. They had to be better prepared,” said Carlos Rodriguez, a 39-year-old construction worker, as he picked up apples, oranges and ready-to-eat meal packages at a food distribution center on Wednesday. His family, which includes two daughters, ages 3 and 7, was struggling, he said.

“We have no electricity, we go to bed late and I use a fan made from a piece of cardboard to give my children some relief,” Rodriguez said.

Hospitals were sending patients who couldn’t be evacuated to homes without power at a sports and events complex where an area had been set up to hold up to 250 people. By late Wednesday afternoon, about 40 patients had arrived and about 70 to 75 more were on the way, Office of Emergency Management spokesman Brent Taylor said.

Meanwhile, Houston Mayor John Whitmire has openly called on the utility company to do a better job.

“That’s the consensus of the people of Houston. That’s mine,” Whitmire said.