CenterPoint Energy, Greater Houston’s embattled electric utility, said it’s “urgently planning and preparing” ahead of Tropical Storm Francine, which is expected to make landfall as a hurricane in Louisiana on Wednesday and represents the first major test for the company since Hurricane Beryl left over 2.2 million Houston-area residents without power in July.
Though Francine is not expected to directly impact Houston, the company is bracing for a worst-case scenario, CenterPoint leadership said at a press conference Monday.
“We’re preparing as if (Francine is) going to hit Houston,” said Darin Carroll, a senior vice president at CenterPoint. “We experienced some things with Beryl that we didn’t expect… We don’t want that to happen again, so we’re preparing as if it’s going to make landfall in this area.”
CenterPoint is responsible for maintaining the systems that deliver power to 2.8 million Houston-area customers. As of Monday evening, company officials said, CenterPoint had deployed over 1,300 vegetation management personnel, with over 1,850 local distribution line workers already in place to restore damaged systems and 1,625 additional frontline workers expected to arrive in Houston by the end of the day.
CenterPoint’s efforts appeared to directly address many of the issues that caused widespread power outages after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Texas coast on Jul. 8, including inadequate vegetation management, which can contribute to downed power lines, and a lag in the deployment of power restoration personnel before and after the storm.
“The service that we provide, both gas and electric, is life-sustaining in many ways and is core to survival for folks and we take that incredibly seriously,” Carroll said. “Our performance during Beryl may not have reflected that completely. In fact, we know it didn’t. We’re ready to show everybody that we have improved.”
Tropical Storm Francine, which was upgraded from a tropical cyclone by the National Weather Service on Monday, is on track to strengthen into a hurricane before it makes landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday. However, forecasters warned that Houston could still see between one to two inches of rain Tuesday evening into Wednesday.
Outage Tracker back online
Centerpoint’s response to Beryl drew the fury of Houstonians and lawmakers alike, who raged over the company’s apparent failure to adequately harden its service area against a relatively low-intensity weather event.
“It’s clear from the events of (Hurricane Beryl) that the quality of (CenterPoint’s) infrastructure, their ability to maintain that infrastructure and their communication with their customers has been called into question,” said Thomas Gleeson, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, in July. The Public Utility Commission, the state’s utilities regulator, opened an investigation into CenterPoint’s handling of Beryl following the storm.
A key complaint among CenterPoint customers during Beryl was the absence of the company’s Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area that identifies areas affected by electrical outages. The tracker went offline during the derecho that ravaged Houston in May, and had still not been restored when Beryl hit in July.
That issue, CenterPoint said, has been resolved. The company urged customers to familiarize themselves with a new and improved Outage Tracker, which went online Aug. 1, in advance of Francine. The Outage Tracker is expected to provide power restoration estimates for the utility’s entire service area within 24 hours of the storm exiting the Houston region. Details on using the new Outage Tracker are available through a demonstration video and an “in-depth, step-by-step guide” on CenterPoint’s website.
“We failed customers by not having one during Beryl,” said Tony Gardner, a senior vice president at CenterPoint, on Monday, calling the experience a “lesson learned.”
Gardner also encouraged customers to prepare for the storm by subscribing to its Power Alert Service, which provides community-specific outage information, including estimated restoration times, via phone call, text or emails.
At the press conference Monday, CenterPoint also revealed an important new addition to its storm preparations that was not in place during Beryl: a “damage model,” which factors in variables like soil conditions, vegetation health and wind speed to predict the impact of the storm.
“We’ve been consistently running that damage model” ahead of Francine, said Carroll. “It’s allowing us to make decisions earlier about the number of resources we might need and the staging sites locations… That is just an example of the types of things that we’re doing so we can be even more responsive to these events, and that’s obviously on top of the resiliency investments that we’ve already made and will continue to make.”
Among those investments are a raft of action steps taken as part of CenterPoint’s Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, which it launched following intense criticism after Beryl. In a statement Sunday, the company described these efforts as its “boldest series of resiliency actions” ever.
“As part of the first phase of its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, throughout August CenterPoint crews and contractors installed more than 1,100 stronger and more resilient fiberglass poles, trimmed vegetation along more than 2,000 miles of power lines and installed more than 300 automation devices in neighborhoods all over Houston,” the company said.
“We heard the calls to action loud and clear in the aftermath of Beryl,” Carroll said Monday. “Ultimately our goal is to become the most resilient grid in the country, and we will do that.”
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