HOUSTON — People in Houston are angry that they can’t get electricity because of the extreme heat. They are blaming the local utility company CenterPoint Energy, which is getting more attention for what people think was a slow reaction to Hurricane Beryl this week on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
On Friday afternoon, more than 800,000 customers still didn’t have power or energy. This was more than four days after the hurricane flooded streets and left more than 2 million people without running air conditioning as temperatures hit the 90s.
“That’s silly.” “We sleep in hot rooms,” said Ruth Gonzalez, who lives in Houston and has been taking cold showers to get to sleep.
She says that the storm and the power company are to blame for the mess.
The $600 worth of food that CenterPoint has thrown away since the storm made her ask, “What in the world are you going to do for us? And how are we going to get our money back for everything we’re losing?”
González and her fiancé, Guy Vasquez, 56, sold their diamond-cluster wedding bands this week to get money for food and gas.
Vasquez talked about their three grandkids and said, “You gotta do what you gotta do to keep the kids fat and full.”
At least eleven people have died in the U.S. and nine in the Caribbean because of the storm. Weather experts say at least three people were killed in the Houston area.
Even though people were angry, Darin Carroll, senior vice president of operations at CenterPoint, told NBC News this week that the company was ready for the storm and had even brought in teams from outside of Houston to get ready to go as soon as it was over.
In the interview, he said, “We understand what it must be like to live in Texas in July and not have electricity.” He also said that it was the fastest time the company had ever been able to restore power to about 1 million homes.
In a news release on Thursday, CenterPoint Energy said that by Sunday, more than 80% of the customers who were affected should have power and energy.
But places with a lot of structural damage might have power outages for a long time while crews work to put up thousands of new distribution poles and overhead conductors, which are needed to move electricity.
The storm “caught the entire service territory with full force,” Carroll said, adding that downed trees and power lines all over the city caused the storm.
He said, “A lot of the time, it’s not just branches; whole trees need to be cleaned up before we can do the restoration.”
It’s been too long since Rosa M. Zelaya, 53, of Humble, a city just outside of Houston, had power. She hasn’t had it since the storm hit on Monday.
She said that she and her two kids have been sleeping in her truck for the past few nights.
“We don’t have anything, it’s terrible.” “We need water and food,” Zelaya said Friday morning as she sloshed through her blue dress. The temperature outside was about 85 degrees, but she had spent most of the morning inside, where it was warmer. “The truck has air, at least.”
Ronald Thompson, 61, from northeast Houston, said he has been living at his church because of the air conditioning and the air mattress that he can blow up.
He, too, said that CenterPoint was partly to blame for where he was living.
Thompson said, “Our bills are due at the end of the month, so things need to get better.” “I am not allowed to go home.”
This whole week, tensions have been rising. CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells said on Saturday that shots were fired at a crew of 100 line workers who were working on repair and they had to leave the area.
Wells said that he knows how hard it is to be without power in the hot Houston weather, but that fears of violence make the restoration work take longer.
Wells said on Saturday, “We have to move our crews to a safe area.” “That’s why I asked you to give our workers space to work safely. We are working day and night to get power back on for all of our users who still don’t have it.
Wells said that the person has been caught by the police.
Also, on Wednesday, the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office got a call about a man threatening to shoot people who work for CenterPoint.
Deputies say the man told the workers, “Hurry up and do your job or I’ll shoot your truck.”
The man was arrested because police think he made terroristic threats and did other dangerous things.
KPRC, an NBC station in Houston, says that someone spray-painted the words “CenterPointless” on a concrete wall next to Interstate 10.
At a news conference this week, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is serving as Gov. Greg Abbott while Abbott is out of state, said that Abbott wants an investigation into how CenterPoint dealt with the storm. He also said that the Public Utility Commission would decide what the consequences would be.
