Half a million Houston-area homes and businesses will still be without power next week, power company says

HOUSTON (AP) — About half a million homes and businesses in the Houston area will still be without power next week, the city’s largest electric company said Thursday, fueling frustration among heat-stricken and frustrated residents and prompting a top state official to call the pace of recovery from Hurricane Beryl “unacceptable.”

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday. And the company hopes to have hundreds of thousands more customers back online by Sunday. But many more will be waiting much longer.

“We know we have a lot more work to do,” Ryan said at a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulator. “We’re not going to stop until it’s done.”

Ryan said the outages that will extend into next week will be concentrated along the Gulf Coast, near where Beryl made landfall.

At a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged CenterPoint to work more quickly to provide relief to residents who have been without power for days and have been forced to seek air conditioning at community cooling centers and meals at food and water distribution points.

FILE – Houston residents Janice Taylor, left, and her daughter Janell spend time at Gallery Furniture, which is being used as a temporary shelter, to cool off and charge their electronics, in Houston, Tuesday, July 9, 2024. The effects of Hurricane Beryl left most area residents without power. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Gay

A new round of thunderstorms hit the Houston area Thursday, adding to their discomfort. The rain brought a brief respite from the heat before temperatures climbed back above 90 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend.

“My friends, it is not acceptable” that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm, said Patrick, who is serving as acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip.

Both Patrick and Abbott have promised the state will investigate the actions taken during the storm. Texas has faced several major storms in the past two decades.

“We’re always going to have big storms in this area. (…) We need to make sure people were prepared the way they should have been,” Patrick said. “It’s a terrible situation for people living in this heat.”

Patrick and Abbott also clashed with the White House over the timing of federal declaration requests for the region, whether to delay storm cleanup aid and other emergency spending.

The Category 1 hurricane (the weakest type) knocked out power to about 2.7 million customers after making landfall, according to PowerOutage.us.

Residents are frustrated that a relatively small storm could cause such disruption at the height of summer.

Some criticized utility, state and city officials for not being prepared for the storm, criticized the slow pace of the restoration process and said CenterPoint’s online map was woefully inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods as restored when they were still without power.

The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it had mobilized to help rebuild were not in the Houston area when the storm hit. Early forecasts called for the storm to make landfall much farther south, along the Gulf Coast near the Texas-Mexico border, before heading toward Houston.

Ryan said the vast majority of the outages were caused by falling trees and tree limbs, and workers had to conduct damage assessments on more than 8,500 miles of power lines.

Beryl has been blamed for at least eight deaths in the United States: one in Louisiana, one in Vermont and six in Texas. Eleven other deaths have been recorded in the Caribbean.

However, the lingering impact of the storm for many Texas residents was the loss of power that left much of the nation’s fourth-largest city in sweltering heat.

Mallary Cohee said her duplex in New Caney, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Houston, has been without power since Monday. She said her “little country neighborhood” is a “disaster” of downed trees, which is why she’s staying at a Houston hotel.

Cohee said she initially thought she could handle the lack of air conditioning because she had managed to get by without it in the summer while serving a two-year prison sentence.

“I thought, ‘I can do this. I can do this. If I can do prison without heat and air conditioning, I might be able to do it,'” Cohee said. “But it’s a whole different story when you don’t even have a fan to plug in.”

The Texas Hospital Association said a “vast majority” of area hospitals are dealing with problems caused by Beryl, including water and wind damage, power and internet problems, staffing shortages or transportation issues.

Carrie Kroll, the association’s vice president of advocacy, public policy and political strategy, said hospitals are seeing “extremely high” numbers of people coming to emergency rooms with symptoms of heatstroke and injuries from debris cleanup.

Hospitals sent more than 100 patients who could not be released from homes without power to a sports and event complex where an area was set up to accommodate up to 250 people, Office of Emergency Management spokesman Brent Taylor said.

___ Lathan, who has worked in Austin, is a member of the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to cover undercovered issues.

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