Power outages persist in Houston, Texas, after Hurricane Beryl tore through the area last week leavings hundreds of thousands of residents without electricity in the middle of a brutal heatwave.
Nearly 300,000 customers have now gone almost a week without electricity and air conditioning during excessive heat where temperatures are reaching 94F (34C).
CenterPoint Energy, the region’s primary utility company, has been slammed by residents, as well as city and state officials, for what many have called poor communication about a timeline for power restoration and a lack of proper planning.
Initially, more than 2.2 million Houstonians had found themselves without power in the immediate aftermath of Beryl, igniting a crisis in the city that led to at least three heat-related deaths, hospitalizations and the forced displacement of people from their homes to find cooler locations.
CenterPoint said on Monday it restored power to more than 2 million customers and expects to approximately 98% restoration by the end of Wednesday, as lineman crews work “around-the-clock and in difficult conditions” to turn the lights and a/c back on.
The company blamed fallen trees and branches from the severe weather for damaging infrastructure and customer-owned equipment, which delivers power to much of the city and surrounding areas.
But the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said in a statement that CenterPoint has “repeatedly failed to deliver power to its customers” and has given the energy company until the end of the month to provide “specific actions to address power outages and reduce the possibility that power will be lost during a severe weather event”.
CenterPoint did not respond to a request for comment.
Abbott, who was in Asia on an economic development trip during the crisis in his state, has also directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) conduct an investigation into the situation.
“It is unacceptable that millions of Texans in the Greater Houston area have been (or were) left without electricity for multiple days. It is imperative we investigate how and why some Texas utilities were unable to restore power for days following a Category 1 Hurricane,” Abbott wrote in a letter on Sunday to PUC chairman Thomas Gleeson.
Cassandra Hollingsworth, who lives in the Spring area of northern Houston and is disabled, told the Guardian that CenterPoint has been “wholly unprepared, which is unacceptable as the largest energy provider in the Houston area”.
“Many elderly and disabled people are suffering and unable to care for themselves in these extreme temperatures, and as far as I’m concerned, anyone who perishes due to the prolonged outages is on CenterPoint,” Hollingsworth, 42, said. “There has to be a stronger system and/or a more urgent response, particularly when most summer days in Houston either are, or feel like, triple digit temperatures.”
