A week after Hurricane Beryl hit, hundreds of thousands still without power in Houston area

A full week after Hurricane Beryl hit the Texas coast, almost 2 million customers in Houston have regained power. However, more than 260,000 customers remained without electricity for an eighth day, according to the outage data provided by CenterPoint, the largest electricity utility in the area.

There have been calls from Houston residents and state lawmakers alike to investigate why it’s taking so long to restore power.

Emily Foxhall, the climate reporter for The Texas Tribune, said a lot of the worst damage is closest to the coast.

“The areas that are going to take the longest are the ones where infrastructure has been damaged. So if whole trees knock down poles, there’s a lot of work – that might be slower work – ahead,” she said.  “So a lot of that was really along the coast where the winds were the strongest. But there’s definitely some pockets around the city that they were concerned about.”

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Foxall said a lot of questions have been raised about whether CenterPoint had done enough to prevent damage during the storm.

“There have been a lot of experts who are really focused on that map, and residents who are focused on that map, too, because I think that was just such a clear place that people saw CenterPoint failing its customers,” she said. “There’s a lot of questions people have about Center Point’s work leading up to this point. You know, like, did they trim trees back appropriately? Did they bulk up their system appropriately? But one place we can really see clearly that the company didn’t meet expectations was in communicating where the outages are and how soon those are going to be fixed.”

Texas lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have called for investigations into CenterPoint’s response to Beryl.

“The governor had sort of asked for two things. One is for CenterPoint to put together a plan themselves for how they would have handled this storm differently. And separately, he asked state regulators to review the utility’s work up until this point,” Foxhall said. “CenterPoint is the company that’s responsible for maintaining the poles and the wires. They are the ones who are actually delivering the power that we all pay for here in the Houston area.

“So he’s asking regulators to see if they spend money appropriately. I think the thing that a lot of experts are also hoping for is sort of this bigger, harder, scarier question, perhaps, that is: Does the state need to be thinking differently about how we prepare our infrastructure for storms?”

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Foxhall said one question here is how much money lawmakers and taxpayers are willing to spend to withstand future storms.

“How much money is appropriate to spend for how strong of a system? There’s things you can do to strengthen a grid,” Foxhall said. “You see these power poles everywhere that are made out of wood, but you can make them out of something stronger, like a material that’s called spun concrete or a composite material.

“You may have also heard people talk about this option for undergrounding lines, which I don’t think anyone is saying should happen all over Houston, but could happen in some more strategic spots. So there’s ways to make a system withstand these winds better than this did. The question is: How much are people willing to spend for that?”

Foxhall said for those who remain without power, frustration is mounting.

“It’s an extremely frustrating situation,” she said. “There have been cooling centers that have been opened, but some people have pointed out how those are closing at 6 p.m. So that doesn’t always meet all of their needs. It really just feels like, on some level, people are having to figure out for themselves how to keep themselves safe.”