Hundreds of thousands in the Houston area remain without power five days after Hurricane Beryl

Friday marks five days without power for hundreds of thousands of Texans after Hurricane Beryl hit the Gulf Coast — and the temperature is only going up.

More than 800,000 people are still without power in the Houston area, raising frustrations and many questions about why restoration is taking so long.

The latest from CenterPoint Energy, the primary provider of electricity for the region, is that they hope to have 80 percent of the total number of their customers reconnected by Sunday. However, that still means hundreds of thousands are likely to be without electricity throughout the weekend and into the start of next week. 

CenterPoint and other area electricity providers gave an update at the Public Utility Commission meeting on Thursday. CenterPoint said customers can expect pockets of prolonged outages throughout their service area into next week.

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Amanda Drane, who covers energy for the Houston Chronicle, said the utility company representatives painted a picture of lots of trees downing power lines and high winds during the storm. Representatives from CenterPoint compared Beryl to Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas coast in 2008.

“They said that Hurricane Ike had a wind gust high of 82 mph at Bush Intercontinental Airport, while Beryl had an 83 mile per hour gust at Bush Intercontinental,” Drane said. “So they compared the winds at that specific location to say that some strong winds from Beryl came further inland than you might expect.”

Members of the commission asked companies to compile more information about which poles were impacted and what they were made of, Drane said. 

“They can make telephone poles out of stronger materials now,” she said. “So I think we’ll see the commission get into more detail about whether the infrastructure has changed and where it needs to change.”

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The commission also urged CenterPoint specifically to improve communication with their customer base. 

“There aren’t a lot of questions being fired at CenterPoint right now. It seems like lawmakers and regulators want CenterPoint to focus on getting the job done — and that’s restoring power to the remaining 877,631 customers in the Houston area that still don’t have power as of right now,” Drane said.

“The (company’s) communication style did start to get scrutiny during the PUC meeting yesterday. Commission Chairman Thomas Gleeson said that he urged CenterPoint to get out in front of its customers and talk to them and work on rebuilding trust.”

City and county leaders have opened cooling centers. A list of relief centers can be found at HoustonOEM.org.