Houston’s largest power company was under increasing pressure Wednesday over its response to Hurricane Beryl, as nearly 1.4 million area homes and businesses remained without power and Residents were looking for places to cool offget gas and find something to eat.
City Councilwoman Abbie Kamin called the extended outage “worrying for life safety.”
“We say, ‘everything we can do’ to get the power back on. In my opinion, respectfully, it should have been back on by now,” Kamin told a CenterPoint Energy executive at a board meeting.
“This was a Category 1 (storm),” Kamin said, referring to the weakest type of hurricane. “We know that this severe weather, that extreme weather due to climate change, is real and we have known that for a long time.”
Power outages peaked at 2.7 million customers when the storm made landfall in Texas on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us. Brad Tutunjian, vice president of regulatory policy for CenterPoint Energy, defended the company’s response, telling council members that more than 1 million customers already had power Wednesday morning, though the number on the company’s online tracking system was just under 1 million at the time.
“For me, this is a monumental figure,” he said.
The company acknowledged that more than 12,000 workers it had called in to help with recovery efforts were not in the Houston area when the storm hit. Initial forecasts called for Beryl to reach shores farther south, near the Texas-Mexico border, before heading toward Houston.
The company did not ask workers from other companies and municipalities to prepare to “weather out” the storm, “because that is not safe,” he said.
“We ask that they stay as close as possible so that they can respond efficiently and practically,” he said, referring to the instructions given to the workers.
Tutunjian noted how difficult it is to quickly restore power that is disrupted by fallen trees and branches.
“When we have storms like this, with trees completely downed… that take down our wires and our poles, that’s when it’s time to do the restoration work,” he said.
Council members pressed Tutunjian, asking why the company, which has been in the Houston area for nearly 100 years, hasn’t installed more cables underground. He said he has been putting all new lines underground in residential areas for decades.
Two council members said they received a text about a house that caught fire after reporting a downed wire. The text said the fire department was unable to do anything and the utility company did not respond.
Beryl has caused at least seven deaths in the United States — one in Louisiana and six in Texas — and at least 11 in the Caribbean. It weakened as it moved into U.S. territory and by Wednesday morning was a limited post-tropical cyclone centered over northeastern Indiana.
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