DALLAS — About 270,000 homes and businesses in the Houston area still don’t have power almost a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas. On Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants the utility that serves the area to be investigated for how it responded to the storm and how it plans to prepare for future ones.
“It’s a given that power companies along the Gulf Coast need to be ready for hurricanes,” Abbott said at his first news conference about Beryl since coming back to the state from a trip to Asia to promote economic growth.
CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers since the storm on July 8. However, the slow recovery rate has made people question whether the utility, which serves the fourth-largest city in the country, was adequately prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat.
Abbott said he would send a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas telling it to look into why the repairs have taken so long and what needs to be done to fix the problem. In the Houston area, Beryl knocked down power lines, trees, and branches that crashed into power lines.
Since there are still months left of hurricane season, Abbott told CenterPoint that it has until the end of the month to explain what it plans to do to cut down on or get rid of power outages during another storm. He said that will include the company giving specific plans on how to get rid of plants that are still blocking power lines.
For his part, Abbott said that CenterPoint did not have “enough workers pre-staged” before the storm.
After Abbott’s news conference, CenterPoint said that getting power back on for the remaining affected customers “as safely and quickly as possible” was its top goal. The company also said that it expected to have power back on for 90% of its customers by Monday. The company CenterPoint promised to work with state and local leaders and do a “thorough review of our response.”
CenterPoint also said on Sunday that it has been “investing for years” to make the area more resistant to storms like these.
The company has defended how it prepared for the storm and said it has hired about 12,000 more people from outside of Houston. It said that putting those workers in the area where the storm was expected to hit before Beryl hit land would have been dangerous.
Last week, Brad Tutunjian, vice president for regulatory policy at CenterPoint Energy, said that the damage to trees and power lines made it harder to get the power back on quickly.
Over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm, and over 18,600 trees had to be cut down that were in the way of power lines. This affected more than 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits, according to a post on CenterPoint’s website on Sunday from the company’s president and CEO, Jason Wells.
