One full week after Beryl, a lot of people still don’t have power.
Seen at I-10 and Sawyer
CenterPoint Energy has restored power to over 2 million customers as of Monday morning, leaving about 250,000 residents without electricity a week after Hurricane Beryl swept through the Houston area.
The much-maligned utility company released a statement Monday that repairs were ahead of its previously announced schedule, with power on track to return to 98 percent of the 2.2 million affected customers by the end of Wednesday.
CenterPoint officials also have started providing customer outage totals for 12 “service areas.” As of 8 a.m. Monday, the Humble and Bellaire areas have the most households without power, totaling over 60,000 in each area. Other areas dealing with the most outages include Greenspoint, southeastern Houston, and Baytown.
“Our restoration crews are now converging on remaining areas with significant structural damage as well as localized outages to get the lights back on for those customers who are without power,” CenterPoint said in their Sunday night statement.
[…]
CenterPoint responded on Sunday night, saying that the Houston area had not been hit by the “dirty side” of a hurricane since 1983. Company officials also said workers have been restoring power at a faster rate than during Hurricane Ike in 2008.
I mean, I know people who were without power for more than two weeks following Ike. One of them stayed with us until she finally got her power restored. I know people who were still without power as of yesterday. I feel terrible for them, and a little guilty that we were only without power for three days. We’ve all had plenty to say about what could have been done and what should now be done. I just want to say how sorry I am to everyone who’s still suffering in the heat. Every one of you deserved so much better. The Chron and the Atlantic have more.
UPDATE: By Monday evening that unlucky number was down to 142K. Still way too many.
My power is still out but, given the widespread devastation, I’m not upset with Centerpoint. Everywhere I looked, I saw trees on top of power lines. We either need to bury our power lines or clear out all trees within a certain distance of electrical lines. The tree trimming initiatives never seem to work (a branch gets trimmed, but the entire tree still falls over). If we aren’t willing to directly address the tree issue, we are just setting ourselves up for the next hurricane.
@Greg: Addressing the tree issue is a third rail.
Lots of folks go insane about their trees – “you ain’t touching my trees. Get off my property now before I make you”.
Centerpoint is not entirely blameless, I have called on behave of residents because sparks from line as branches hit them. Centerpoint response was to remove anything that could catch on fire.
I am also without power.
Ross is correct about people and their trees. I, unfortunately have neighbors like that, thus I am in a nested area.
Chronicle today, Whitmire was there best friend in the senate.
Whitmire promised all debris picked in a month. Our heavy trash is a week and a half behind schedule.