Nearly a week after Hurricane Beryl struck Texas, some 270,000 homes and businesses are still without power in the Houston area, and Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he was demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the region and answers about how it is prepared for future storms.
“It goes without saying that Gulf Coast utilities must be prepared to deal with a hurricane,” Governor Abbott said at his first press conference about Beryl since returning to the state from an economic development tour of Asia.
CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers since the storm hit on July 8, but the slow pace of restoration has drawn intense scrutiny over whether the utility that provides power to the nation’s fourth-largest city was adequately prepared for the storm that forced many to go without air conditioning in scorching summer heat.
Governor Abbott said he has sent a letter to the Public Utilities Commission of Texas requesting that they investigate why it is taking so long to restore power and what needs to be done to fix it.
In the Houston area, Beryl toppled power lines, uprooted trees and broke branches that crashed into power lines.
With hurricane season still months away, Governor Abbott has asked CenterPoint to specify by the end of the month what steps it will take to reduce or eliminate power outages if new storms hit.
He said that includes the company providing a detailed plan for removing vegetation that still threatens power lines.
Abbott also said CenterPoint “did not pre-position a sufficient number of workers” before the storm hit.
After Governor Abbott’s press conference, CenterPoint said its top priority is “getting power back to our remaining affected customers as safely and quickly as possible,” adding that it expects to restore power to 90% of its customers on Monday.
CenterPoint said it is committed to working with state and local leaders to “thoroughly review our response.”
CenterPoint also said Sunday that it has “invested for years” in making the area more resilient to such storms.
The company defended its storm preparations, saying it had deployed about 12,000 extra workers from outside Houston.
Officials say it would have been dangerous to pre-position crews within the storm’s predicted impact area before Beryl made landfall.
Brad Tutunjian, vice president of regulatory policy for CenterPoint Energy, said last week that extensive damage to trees and utility poles is preventing power from being restored quickly.
The storm damaged more than 2,100 utility poles, required the removal of more than 18,600 trees from power lines and affected more than 75 percent of the utility’s distribution circuits, according to a website post Sunday by CenterPoint President and CEO Jason Wells.
