Texas Governor Greg Abbott Demands Answers as Customers Remain Without Power After Beryl

DALLAS (AP) — With about 350,000 homes and businesses still no energy in the Houston area almost a week later Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he is demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area, as well as answers about its preparations for upcoming storms.

“Energy companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” Abbott said in his first news conference on Beryl since returning to the state after an economic development trip to Asia.

While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 1.9 million customers since the July 8 storm, the slow pace of recovery has placed the utility, which provides electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city, under assembly scrutiny about whether it was sufficiently prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the scorching summer heat.

Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas demanding it investigate why the restoration took so long and what should be done to fix it. In the Houston area, Beryl downed power lines, uprooted trees and broke branches that collided with power lines.

With hurricane season still months away, Abbott said he is giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it will do to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He said this will include the company providing detailed plans to remove vegetation that still threatens power lines.

Abbott also said CenterPoint did not have “an adequate number of pre-prepared workers” before the storm.

CenterPoint, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the governor’s news conference, said in a Sunday news release that it expects power to be restored to 90% of its customers by the end of the day Monday.

The utility defended its preparation for the storm and said it brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. He said it would not be safe to deploy these workers within the storm’s predicted area of ​​impact before Beryl made landfall.

Brad Tutunjian, vice president of regulatory policy at CenterPoint Energy, said last week that extensive damage to trees and power poles has hampered the ability to quickly restore power.

A Sunday post on CenterPoint’s website from its president and CEO, Jason Wells, said more than 2,100 poles were damaged during the storm and more than 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, which impacted more than 75% of dealership distribution circuits.