More than 1 million without power as CenterPoint promises restoration times – Houston Public Media

More than 1 million CenterPoint Energy customers were without power as of midday Thursday as CenterPoint officials promised for the first time that restoration estimates would be posted on its status tracker.

The company met its initial goal of restoring power to at least 1 million people by the end of Wednesday, moving closer to the threshold of full restoration.

CenterPoint expects to restore power to an additional 400,000 customers by the end of the day Friday and to another 350,000 customers by the end of the day Sunday.

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But CenterPoint officials told the Public Utilities Commission on Thursday that up to 500,000 customers could still be without power a week after Hurricane Beryl slammed the Houston area with winds of more than 80 mph. At the peak of the outages Monday night, more than 2.2 million people were without power.

CenterPoint blamed fallen trees caused by Beryl as it passed through the area as the main cause of the power outages. The trees were “vulnerable due to severe frost, drought and heavy rains over the past three years,” the company said.

An outage map released by CenterPoint Tuesday night was immediately criticized by customers on social media as inaccurate.

The original utility map was removed following the derecho. Updates on outage numbers throughout the storm were displayed in a box with the number of people without power and a second box with the number of people whose power was restored.

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Logan Anderson, a spokesman for CenterPoint, said customers should not expect the map to be completely accurate.

“This static map is meant to give customers a visual approximation of where we are in the restoration process in the area around them,” Anderson said. “So there may be places where the boundaries don’t match, or people see themselves in an area that’s, you know, labeled as live when they’re not. That doesn’t mean we don’t know that you’re out.”

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Anderson said the map will continue to be updated and improved.

“We’re going to continue to learn throughout this process,” she said. “We’re just trying to provide customers with as much information as we can as it comes in. So if customers feel like the map doesn’t reflect what they’re seeing on the ground, that’s probably not the case at certain times of the day, simply because our repair work or assessments may have exceeded the initial estimate.”

But customers and politicians are lashing out at CenterPoint, frustrated with the company’s response to the hurricane.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) publicly criticized CenterPoint in a letter to the company’s CEO that she posted on social media.

“This is not just a disservice; it is a risk to our lives,” she wrote on Twitter.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who was overseas on an economic development trip, told Bloomberg he wants the state Public Utilities Commission to investigate the problem of repeated outages in the Houston area. Nearly 1 million people lost power in May when a derecho hit the region.

“I want the PUC to provide me and the Texas Legislature with information so that we can take action next year to ensure that events like this do not happen again,” Abbott told the outlet.

Dominic Anthony Walsh contributed to this report.