Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas early Monday, resulting in 10 deaths and causing torrential flooding, power outages, structural damage, and travel headaches for thousands.
As of Tuesday, CenterPoint Energy, a large utility company headquartered in Houston, reported that 1.8 million customers were still without power in the Houston area despite the company having mobilized nearly 12,000 frontline resources. A heatwave that followed in the wake of the hurricane meant that those without power were left suffering in the high temperatures, as reported by The Dallas Express.
CenterPoint said Thursday morning that it expects 500,000 customers to still be without power by next week. In a post on social media, the company said that it hopes to restore 80% of its customers by Sunday.
The power problem has garnered national attention, with a report in The Wall Street Journal asking: Why Can’t Houston Keep the Power On? Here’s the start of the story:
Across this city’s famous suburban sprawl, drivers for the fourth straight day are inching through intersections without working traffic signals.
With a brutal heat wave settling over the region, residents are piling into “cooling centers” to charge their phones and soak up air conditioning they no longer have at home.
And just about everyone is wondering why—in the country’s fourth-largest city, which calls itself the energy capital of the world—widespread power outages like this keep happening.
Most of the questions are pointed at CenterPoint Energy, which has spent nearly $1.5 billion in recent years to make Houston’s power grid more resilient but failed to hit some state targets for reliability. Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall Monday outside of Houston as a Category 1 storm, was the latest event to show how the combination of continued population growth and increasingly extreme weather is proving difficult to overcome.
Beryl initially left more than 2.2 million of CenterPoint’s 2.8 million Houston-area customers without power. It was the utility’s largest-ever power outage, officials said, prompting widespread criticism of the company’s storm preparation efforts and system maintenance.
It took more than a day for the company to publish an online outage map, some of which wasn’t accurate, and it still hasn’t estimated when full restoration will occur. More than one million customers remained without power on Thursday.