DALLAS — With still approximately 350,000 homes and businesses without power in the Houston area nearly a week after Hurricane Beryl Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he is demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area and answers about its preparations for the coming storms.
“Energy companies along the Gulf Coast need to be prepared for hurricanes, that’s stating the obvious,” Abbott said during his first news conference on Beryl since returning to the state from an economic development trip to Asia.
While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 1.9 million customers since the July 8 storm, the slow recovery has strained the utility, which supplies electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city. increasing control about whether it was adequately prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the scorching summer heat.
Abbott said he sent a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas asking it to investigate why the recovery took so long and what needs to be done to fix it. In the Houston area, Beryl knocked down power lines, uprooted trees and snapped branches that hit power lines.
With months of hurricane season still to come, Abbott said he is giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to detail what it will do to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He said that includes the company providing detailed plans to remove vegetation that still threatens power lines.
Abbott also said CenterPoint did not have “an adequate number of pre-prepared employees” before the storm hit.
CenterPoint, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment following the governor’s news conference, said in a news release Sunday that it expected 90% of customers to have power restored by the end of the day Monday.
The utility has defended its preparation for the storm, saying it brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would have been unsafe to place those workers in the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.
Brad Tutunjian, vice president of regulatory policy at CenterPoint Energy, said last week that extensive damage to trees and utility poles made it difficult to quickly restore power.
In a post on CenterPoint’s website Sunday, President and CEO Jason Wells said more than 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm and more than 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, affecting more than 75 percent of the utility’s distribution circuits.