Hurricane Beryl “more heavily impacted” Houston’s electric infrastructure than originally anticipated, the area’s primary electricity provider said Monday in an afternoon press release.
The Cat 1 hurricane led to widespread outages affecting more than 2.26 million customers across the Houston metro area, according to the utility’s website.
CenterPoint did not provide a timeline for service restoration in the press release, saying its crews are still assessing the damage sustained by its electric systems during the storm. Beryl pummeled Houston early Monday, causing widespread flooding, infrastructure damage and at least four deaths.
While customers along unimpacted systems may see power restored quickly, others in harder-hit areas “may experience prolonged outages and should prepare accordingly,” the company said. CenterPoint did not identify which areas should expect to remain without power.
That was from midday Monday. On Monday night, CenterPoint sent out an email saying they hoped to have at least one million customers’ power restored by the end of the day Wednesday. The Chron has more.
CenterPoint Energy estimated Monday evening that it would restore power to 1 million customers by end of day Wednesday, July 10.
[…]
CenterPoint’s outage tracker reported nearly 1.9 million customers affected — down from a peak 2.26 million– on Monday night. A spokesperson said Monday evening it restored power to nearly 285,000 customers on Monday; it is unclear how many of those are temporary restorations.
In a statement late Monday afternoon, CenterPoint said it would estimate when power would be restored only after its crews complete a damage assessment. The statement did not address how long the assessment would take; crews must also begin routing power through intact lines and clearing vegetation.
After that damage assessment, CenterPoint said it would begin publishing estimates of when power will be restored, with those projections growing more detailed over time.
At a press conference hosted by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo on Monday afternoon, CenterPoint official Paul Locke said in response to questions that the utility will “have a better idea sometime tomorrow (Tuesday) on the timeline (for) restoration.”
“We understand how difficult it is to be without power for any amount of time, especially in the heat,” said Lynnae Wilson, a CenterPoint vice president, said in the company’s prepared statement. “We are laser focused on the important and time-sensitive work that lies ahead.”
The company’s statement also noted that “customers in the hardest-hit areas may experience prolonged outages and should prepare accordingly.” It did not specify the areas considered hardest-hit.
The number of homes and businesses in the dark is more than double those left powerless during the peak of May’s derecho event, which knocked 922,000 offline. It took six days to restore nearly all of those customers.
Monday morning’s outage is the largest total number of Houston area customers without electricity in CenterPoint history, topping the 2.1 million customers who lost power during Hurricane Ike in September 2008.
It took us three days to get our power back in May. I’m hoping we’re among the lucky ones this time, but we’ll see. The number of affected customers was at 1.7 million on Tuesday morning. I may or may not be able to get an update into this post before Wednesday. Hang in there.
My power back on after 30 hours, about the same as the May storm. The outage would have been a lot more bearable if my neighbor had done more to quiet their loud, endlessly droning generator. Please have a thought for others during a trying period.
All the executives who failed to adequately prepare should have this year’s salary docked and split among the people out there doing repairs. How many not so subtle hints do these people need that the old infrastructure just isn’t up to our new normal?
Hope you get power back today, Kuff!
Amen about the generators and especially the fat cats at Centerpoint.
I guess that’s the new normal, now: 48-72 hour power outage for a once a year weather event. I didn’t think we had come to that by now, but that’s what it looks like. Maybe we should be inclluding this info on home listings and leasing agreements. When Mom was pregnant with me in November 1965, NYC had a big blackout which brought the region to a standstill … and made the national news. Turns out that the famous blackout only lasted about 6-9 hours. This is what we call progress.
Correction: it looks like the 1965 nyc power outage lasted as long as 13 hours for some people according to wikipedia. It’s hard to imagine how people at that time could have endured it for that long. Since the 1970s as long as I can remember, I don’t remember Houston having an outage as long as 2 days, and yet in the last 10 years this is becoming more common. I get it: warmer weather caused by climate change might have made weather events more severe, but I can’t believe that explains it entirely
I’m curious about how many downed lines could have been prevented by more proactive tree trimming. Putting up more wind resistant power infrastructure will take time. Upping the tree trimming could start now. It’s long past time for CenterPoint to take more responsibility there.
In 1983 after Alicia, I didn’t have power for 6 days, so long outages have happened. The trees are 40 years older now with many near end of life, which is why they are falling.
Centerpoint was very aggressive with tree trimming some time ago. Then people started suing and raising hell about their precious trees being ruined. Centerpoint stopped being as aggressive after that. Maybe it’s time for every tree near a power line to be cut down.
Did you get here after Ike hit? Some people were without power for weeks, although a September front blew in afterwards and the weather was actually not bad. I was lucky back then and got power back within hours. This time is my turn to be unlucky, as I still don’t have power.
Houston Matters this morning was talking to an arborist. He said we should think more about the types of trees we choose to plant and where. I think planting ash trees should be banned.
We need as many tree as we can sustain in order to mitigate pollution and heat island effects and also to enjoy the health benefits of natural surroundings, so there are decisions that need to be carefully weighed. I don’t believe that trees are all of the problem. Power lines and supports can be made stronger. To me, it is pretty simple- which is better, a strong house that withstands storms, or one that gets all torn up every time we have a storm. I think that having to rebuild the grid on an emergency basis after every storm will be more expensive than doing it right one time.
Also, in Montrose and Midtown I have not seen any trees near power lines that were not aggressively trimmed.
CenterPoint may be between a rock and a hard place regarding tree intrusion into its utility easements. How to do it as it should be done without experiencing tons of pushback and bad PR? I also can’t comprehend the complete laxity of the City of Houston and other municipalities allowing apparently unbridled planting of trees on their ROW along city streets and under overhead utilities. This is insane yet it just goes on and on and on. Then there’s the problem that trees in the landscape are promoted as bordering on a utopian ideal, but there are never any disclaimers that trees need regular maintenance, and said maintenance isn’t cheap. Consequently we seem to have thousands of mis-placed and hazardous trees which suddenly come to light in an event like this. The unfortunate deaths of people killed by falling trees, in addition to being tragic, is a reminder to anyone with trees in their yard to evaluate them without any sentimentality and to imagine their potential for causing harm to you and your neighbors.
The city ROW is still private property as far as I know. The city could mandate what trees are allowed, I guess. Natural trees have evolved to withstand wind storms, and problems are introduced when unskilled persons do trimming. The most usual tree stupidity that I see is the trimming of all smaller branches off of the main branch until the end, where a puff of foliage is allowed to remain. This allows the full force of the wind to get into the tree, and the foliage puff puts maximum leverage on the branch since it is out on the end.
Trees in forests aren’t trimmed, but somehow survive anyway. Must be some kind of a miracle. Humans really should insert themselves fully into every aspect of the natural world, since we are obviously sooo much smarter than plants and bugs and stuff.
Champions Tree Service gets credit for me never getting a limb through my roof. I’ve learned quite a bit since I bought my house. As for anyone complaining about future tree trimming, two words “remember Beryl”.