Houston City Council Criticizes CenterPoint’s Failure to Keep Lights On During Hurricane Beryl – Houston Public Media

Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media

A CenterPoint representative sat in the hot seat Wednesday, responding to Houston City Council concerns about how Beryl, a Category 1 hurricane, caused the largest power outage in the energy company’s history.

Brad Tutunjiun, CenterPoint’s vice president of regulatory policy, repeatedly told board members that the company was prepared for Hurricane Beryl. He said the company began field exercises last month, emergency operations began 72 hours before the hurricane hit and 24 hours before it made sure “all of our resources were available.”

Council members then asked Tutunjiun to explain how more than 2.2 million people in and around Houston were left without power. There were fewer power outages during Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm in 2008.

He pointed to Houston’s trees and broken branches that had fallen on power lines.

“When we have storms like this, with the trees completely falling out of the ground, taking out our power lines and poles, that’s when all the time comes into play to do the restoration work,” Tutunjiun said.

He said the number of Houston residents without power has since dropped to 560,000 as of Wednesday morning. According to CenterPoint’s website, as of Wednesday afternoon, more than 1.2 million customers were still without power. The city council asked Tutunjiun how so many people lost their power.

RELATED: Houston power outages: CenterPoint releases outage map; 1.2 million still without power after Beryl

“We’re never going to be able to completely withstand a hurricane without service disruption, but there are a lot of things we could think about differently,” he said, later adding that “storms are more frequent. They’re more severe, and our paradigm of how we think about things has to change.”

Tutunjiun added that despite weather forecasts, Beryl’s strength and direction were unpredictable.

“It’s hard to know exactly how many resources you need, and so the way it typically happens is once the storm has passed, you assess the damage and you figure out what your needs are,” he said.

But Councilmember Abbie Kamin said that even if the storm’s northern path wasn’t in the early forecast, they should have been prepared anyway.

“We are past the time when you could say it was not predictable,” Kamin told Tutunjiun.

She stressed that being without power for days poses a health hazard, especially during this week’s triple-digit heat indexes.

“It’s hot outside, isn’t it? It’s a safety issue now,” Kamin told Tutunjiun. “So when we say we can do whatever we can to restore the light, in my opinion, they should do it.”

Councilman Edward Pollard said his office, along with those of other council members, has been inundated with calls from residents.

“These are heartbreaking calls from elderly people, people with little means, children, elderly parents, and they don’t understand why the power is not being restored,” he said.

RELATED: Multiple distribution and cooling centers open in Houston area as residents find food and escape the heat

Council members asked CenterPoint to focus on efforts to prevent outages, rather than fixing them after they occur.

Ramirez said he was one of more than half a million Houston residents without power and was “not happy, especially since I went through this for four or five days just a couple weeks ago with the derecho.”

He said he understands the need to prune trees, “but it’s not a cure… I’m waiting for CenterPoint to start doing things that will prevent this from happening again.”

Ramirez suggested burying the power lines.

Tutunjiun said CenterPoint’s new standard is to put the lines underground, but Houston’s electrical infrastructure is more than a century old and “has been above ground for a long time, and to go back and try to put those facilities underground” would be “monumental in terms of cost.”

But Kamin asked Tutunjiun for an estimate of the costs of the May derecho and Beryl. He said that while bills are still pending for the derecho, the overall cost “is in the millions.” He also added that it was too early to say how much Beryl cost the city.

Kamin said she asked the question because the costs of losing power could be greater than the costs of burying power lines to prevent such outages.

Council members also asked him to explain why CenterPoint’s power outage tracking system was down during Monday’s hurricane.

“We were experiencing capacity restrictions due to all the people accessing the system,” Tutunjiun said. “We didn’t anticipate the number of bots and third-party companies that were constantly pinging our facility, which caused our outage tracking system to crash.”

At-Large Council Member Sallie Alcorn stepped back and asked a simple question: When can Houston residents expect their power to be restored?

Tutunjiun said it was difficult to predict.

“In order for us to do that, we have to have someone physically walk the entire circuit, and there’s debris on the ground that’s going to slow them down,” he said. “A lot of our circuits are in backyards, where they’re blocked by fences, which takes time. And so for us to have full confidence in what we’re looking at, we have to have all that information, and we understand that’s frustrating.”

Mayor John Whitmire said he shared that frustration and that they “should do a better job.”

“Someone just asked me on social media if I was angry. Yes, I am angry this morning.”