CenterPoint Releases Hurricane Beryl Power Outage Map

CenterPoint Energy, the city’s main electricity provider, released an interactive map Tuesday night that provides a snapshot of Hurricane Beryl’s impact on Houston.

The map’s debut comes just weeks before its highly anticipated arrival — CenterPoint spokesman Paul Lock said Tuesday that the map would be completed “in the coming weeks” and likely wouldn’t be useful for tracking Beryl’s restoration efforts.

Access outage tracking here.

The energy company has not had an outage map since it was wiped during the deadly May disaster that left more than a million customers without power. Officials said too many visitors to their site in May “overloaded” the map, causing “technical difficulties,” such as areas incorrectly indicating that they had power when they were in the dark.

CenterPoint is responsible for the systems that provide electricity to nearly 2.8 million customers in the Houston area. When deadly Hurricane Beryl swept through the Houston area early Monday morning, it knocked out power to nearly 80% of its customer base, or 2.2 million customers.

The lack of neighborhood-wide data has been a source of frustration for many CenterPoint customers, both in May and after Hurricane Beryl, as residents seek answers about which areas were hardest hit and when their power will return.

In the absence of an official map of power outages after Beryl, frustrated Houstonians have turned to the Whataburger app to track power outages in the area. One social media user went viral after pointing out that their interactive map shows where in the city was shut down after the storm, and his creative solution garnered national attention.

The Whataburger app functions as a power outage tracker, which is handy since the power company doesn’t display a map.
Still nearly 1.9 million power outages. pic.twitter.com/d8srWmw1oV

—Barbecue Bryan (@BBQBryan) July 9, 2024

The official map released Tuesday by CenterPoint divides service areas into three categories: areas with power, areas that need repair and areas that the company is still evaluating. It also shows how many customers lost power in each ZIP code.

The map does not indicate when residents should expect their power to be restored, though officials promised their new tool would offer “the same level of outage information and functionality” as the previous map.

This feature could be offered in the coming days.

“As CenterPoint completes its damage assessment in the coming days, it will provide more detailed information on the anticipated restoration timeline,” the company said in a statement.

As of 8 p.m. Tuesday, CenterPoint said in a statement that it had restored power to 850,000 customers, though its website says only 675,000 customers have had their power restored. They expect that number to reach 1 million by the end of Wednesday, but have not yet provided an estimate for the remaining residents and businesses.

“It’s going to take days,” Lock said. “I can’t give you a specific date, but it’s not going to be tomorrow.”

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