Tropical Storm Beryl: Latest on storm damage in Texas

Hurricane Beryl has knocked out power to more than 2.7 million Texas customers as of 12:59 a.m. Monday, according to estimates from PowerOutage.us and CenterPoint Energy.

CenterPoint announced at 3:30 p.m. that its crews were beginning the process of restoring power to the 2.26 million Texas customers who CenterPoint has not yet provided an estimate of when millions of its customers will have power restored.

“We are mobilizing all available resources, as well as mutual aid resources from other utility companies, to begin the process of quickly and safely restoring power to our customers,” said Lynnae Wilson, senior vice president of Electric Business at CenterPoint. “We understand how difficult it is to be without power for an extended period of time, especially during extreme heat. We are focused on the important and urgent work ahead.”

CenterPoint will begin issuing estimates for substantial power restorations after assessing the damage.

Outages were most significant in the Houston area and coastal counties, including Matagorda, where Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane around 4 a.m. Monday. Major outages also occurred in Galveston, Calhoun and Jackson counties. As the morning progressed, outages spread further inland and into East Texas, including Polk, San Jacinto, Montgomery, Grimes and Washington counties.

Most of the outages are affecting customers who receive power from CenterPointEnergy. CenterPoint is the primary electricity provider for the vast majority of residents in Harris and Fort Bend counties and also provides power to dozens of communities in East Texas. The utility does not currently provide county-specific outage figures.

CenterPoint advised people to stay away from downed power lines and not attempt to remove tree branches or objects from power lines. Instead, customers are advised to report outages and unsafe conditions to their power company or local authorities.

As of noon, about 25,000 AEP customers in Texas were still without power. Most of those outages were in the Corpus Christi area, a loop that stretches from Port Lavaca to Bay City, El Campo and Victoria. AEP crews began restoring power to some customers Monday and expect to have more information on restoration within the next 24 hours.

For the more than 25,000 Oncor Electric Delivery customers who were affected by the outages, power restoration will likely be done on a case-by-case basis, according to Oncor spokeswoman Kaiti Blake.

— Pooja Salhotra and Berenice Garcia