1 of 3 | Crews with CenterPoint Energy in Houston are working to restore electricity to parts of Houston, the nation’s fourth most populated city, but company officials admitted that half a million customers could still be without power on Monday, a week after the hurricane barreled ashore nearby. File Photo by
skeeze/Pixabay July 11 (UPI) — More than 1.2 million utility customers in Houston remain without power in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, which came ashore in Southeast Texas early in the week, utility officials said Thursday afternoon.
Crews with CenterPoint Energy in Houston are working to restore electricity to parts of the nation’s fourth-most populated city, but company officials admitted that half a million customers could still be without power on Monday, a week after the hurricane barreled ashore near Matagorda Bay.
CenterPoint vowed to have power restored to as many as 400,000 people by Friday afternoon and another 350,000 by the end of Saturday.
Many customers remain upset at CenterPoint’s lack of perceived progress in a city with one of the most unstable energy grids in the country, according to Whisker Labs.
On Monday, Beryl whipped the Houston area with 80 mph winds and torrential rain, which caused widespread flooding. More than 2.2 million were without power Monday night, CenterPoint said, largely as a result of power lines crippled by debris and falling trees.
The storm came ashore south of Houston but brought torrential rain, flooding, and damaging, straight-line winds in suburbs farther north, including in the city of Katy.
“The extremely powerful wind gusts brought down trees, which took out power lines when they fell, resulting in the loss of electricity for thousands of customers,” an area fire official said.
CenterPoint released an online outage map to help customers understand where power was out and when it might be restored.
“What this static map is meant to do is to give customers a visual approximation of where we are in the restoration process in the area around them,” CenterPoint spokesperson Logan Anderson said. He added that the map was not meant to be 100 percent accurate and up to date.
“We do apologize that this is not the level of information that we would want to be able to provide,” he said.
Government officials in other parts of Texas’ biggest city opened air-conditioned shelters where residents could receive emergency services, food and water, and use charging stations for electronic devices.
Houston has a long history of sustaining storm damage, including from hurricane Ike in 2008, which was among the costliest recorded storms in U.S. history at the time.
“It still ranks among the top 10, and was a devastating wind and surge event,” the Houston weather website Spacecityweather.com said.
Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017 and was listed as the worst flood storm in U.S. history, according to the website.
