Following Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall in Southeast Texas early this week, more than 1.2 million utility customers in Houston are still without power, according to utility authorities on Thursday afternoon.
Although workers from CenterPoint Energy in Houston are attempting to bring power back to areas of the fourth most populous city in the US, the firm said on Monday that as of one week after the hurricane made landfall close to Matagorda Bay, half a million customers might still be without it.
Up to 400,000 customers could have power restored by Friday afternoon, according to CenterPoint, and an additional 350,000 by Saturday night.
According to Whisker Labs, many consumers are still dissatisfied with CenterPoint’s apparent lack of progress in a city with one of the nation’s most unreliable electrical systems.
Beryl battered the Houston region on Monday with winds of up to 80 mph and pouring rain, resulting in extensive flooding. According to CenterPoint, almost 2.2 million people lacked electricity on Monday night, mainly as a consequence of downed trees and debris damaging power lines.
Although the storm made landfall north of Houston, it caused severe rain, flooding, and destructive straight-line winds in the suburbs to the north, including Katy.
“The extremely powerful wind gusts brought down trees, which took out power lines when they fell, resulting in the loss of electricity for thousands of customers,” an area fire official stated.
To assist clients in understanding where power was down and when it may be restored, CenterPoint released an online outage map.
“What this static map is meant to do is to give customers a visual approximation of where we are in the restoration process in the area around them,” CenterPoint spokesperson Logan Anderson stated. He added that the map was not meant to be 100 percent accurate and up to date.
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“We do apologize that this is not the level of information that we would want to be able to provide,” he stated.
Elsewhere in the largest city in Texas, government representatives set up air-conditioned shelters where locals could get emergency assistance, food and drink, and charge their electronics.
Hurricane Ike in 2008, one of the most expensive hurricanes ever documented in American history at the time, was only one of many storms that Houston has experienced in the past.
According to the Houston weather website Spacecityweather.com, “it still ranks among the top 10 and was a devastating wind and surge event.”
The website states that Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in 2017, was the greatest flood storm to ever hit the United States.
