Houston — July 10, 2024 – In the approximately 48 hours since Hurricane Beryl exited CenterPoint Energy's service area, the company has continued its progress restoring power to its 2.26 million impacted customers. As of 1 p.m. CT, CenterPoint has restored electricity to more than 914,000 customers, representing 40% of the customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl.
“We take our responsibility of serving our customers and working as safely and as quickly as possible to restore service very seriously," said Lynnae Wilson, Senior Vice President, Electric Business. “At the same time, we fully understand our customers are hot and growing more impatient with their outages."
Despite maintaining much of its strength, as well as hurricane-force winds and higher gusts as it moved through CenterPoint's service area, the company's overall system largely operated as intended during the storm, including its transmission towers, high-voltage lines and substations, which did not experience significant damage. The outages addressed to this point in the process have been largely related to CenterPoint's distribution system of poles and wires, which is designed to lock out in order to prevent further damage from debris and protect public safety – similar to a home electrical breaker tripping as a safety measure. However, certain parts of CenterPoint's service area experienced major damage, especially along the coast where its system will need to be rebuilt. Uprooted and downed trees on poles and wires have also caused significant damage in many areas across Greater Houston.
CenterPoint's response actions have included mobilizing more than 12,000 restoration personnel, including mutual assistance professionals from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Tennessee, and West Virginia. In addition, available employees from CenterPoint's natural gas business are supporting the electric restoration efforts.
The company has increased its staging sites to 18, the most it has ever stood up for a storm response. The sites are strategically positioned to support safe, effective and efficient deployment into the field. CenterPoint has also deployed nine mobile generation units, including to cooling centers, water treatment facilities, hospitals and assisted living centers, and expects to deploy more in the coming days.
CenterPoint also recognizes that customers need information about the status of their service. The company is in the process of moving its Outage Tracker to a cloud-based tool that can accommodate a significant increase in traffic during a storm response. CenterPoint has published a new tracker that provides initial restoration status for customers. The purpose of the new restoration status tracker and other resources is for customers to better understand the restoration process and to give general direction on restoration activities. As the company continues its progress on damage assessment, it expects to provide more specific estimated restoration times beginning tomorrow morning.
CenterPoint's electric customers are encouraged to enroll in Power Alert Service® to receive outage details and community-specific restoration updates as they become available. For information and updates, follow @CenterPoint for updates during inclement weather events.
