Dallas – With approximately 270,000 homes and businesses in the Houston area still without power nearly a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that he is demanding an investigation into the utility’s response as well as answers about its preparations for future storms.
“Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” Abbott said at his first news conference on Beryl after returning to the state from an economic development trip to Asia.
While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to approximately 2 million customers since the storm hit on July 8, the slow pace of recovery has raised concerns about whether the utility, which serves the nation’s fourth-largest city, was adequately prepared for the storm, which left people without air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat.
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Abbott stated that he was writing a letter to the Texas Public Utility Commission, requesting that it investigate why restoration has taken so long and what needs to be done to repair it. In the Houston area, Beryl toppled transmission lines, uprooted trees, and snapped branches that collided with power wires.
With months of hurricane season remaining, Abbott said he’s giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to describe how it plans to lessen or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He stated that the corporation will provide specific plans for removing vegetation that still threatens electrical lines.
Abbott also claimed that CenterPoint did not have “an adequate number of workers pre-staged” before the storm struck.
Following Abbott’s news conference, CenterPoint stated that its top priority was to provide “power to the remaining impacted customers as safely and quickly as possible,” and that the utility intends to restore power to 90% of its customers by Monday. CenterPoint stated that it was dedicated to engaging with state and local leaders and doing a “thorough review of our response.”
CenterPoint also stated Sunday that it has been “investing for years” to improve the area’s resilience to similar storms.
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The utility has defended its preparation for the hurricane, claiming that it has sent in approximately 12,000 additional staff from outside Houston. It stated that prepositioning those workers within the expected storm impact area before Beryl’s arrival would have been dangerous.
Last Monday, Brad Tutunjian, vice president for regulatory policy at CenterPoint Energy, stated that substantial damage to trees and electrical poles impeded the ability to restore power quickly.
According to a post ABC News Sunday by its president and CEO, Jason Wells, over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm, and over 18,600 trees had to be removed from power wires, affecting more than 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits.