HOUSTON – CenterPoint Energy says they believe they can have power restored to 1 million customers affected by Hurricane Beryl by the end of the day on Wednesday.
The company’s Director of Communications, Alyssia Oshodi, spoke with KPRC 2 Monday evening to provide more insights into what the company is dealing with in terms of power restoration and where the process stands now.
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“I think it definitely ended up having a more significant impact than what we had initially thought was headed our way,” Oshodi said. “I mean, even a few days ago, it wasn’t even projected to impact the Houston area to the extent in which it did. So we did a lot of prep ahead of the storm coming in the days leading up to it, but again, just all significant damage beyond what we thought we would.”
Oshodi said about 12,000 workers, specifically line workers and vegetation management professionals, have been mobilized to help restore power to affected areas. She said those workers should start arriving in the area tonight and more will come in Tuesday and Wednesday.
“What we’re really going to be spending the next couple of days doing is getting a visual assessment of the damage to our system so that we can develop appropriate restoration plan. So as those efforts are happening, we are actively restoring as well. We are sitting at just under 2 million customers out. So we restored approximately 285,000 customers since the storm has come through,” she said.
When asked how Beryl compares to the Derecho event which happened in May in terms of damage to infrastructure, Oshodi said they should be able to give a better answer Tuesday as crews continue to inspect the damage.
“Just by those numbers alone, they indicate that we likely do have more damage to the system where we, you know, have over 2 million customers out versus what was approximately 900,000 out during the May event,” she said.
KPRC 2 asked Oshodi if there were any areas in particular the company was concerned could take more time than others to restore power. She said while they are still assessing the damage and collecting information to answer that question specifically, they believe they’ll be able to restore power to one million affected customers by the end of Wednesday.
“Based on our efforts and how we expect those to progress, we think we’ll be able to get a million customers restored by Wednesday,” she said. “When we’re talking about those hardest hit areas, we do expect that those customers and those areas will experience extended outages. So we want folks to plan accordingly. We know that this is a very difficult time to be without power. And especially given the heat that we experience in our area. So we’re doing everything we can to work as quickly as possible to restore our customers.”
Oshodi said the company will provide multiple updates each day on their progress in restoring power.
“We just want to continue to convey that we know we have significant work ahead and important work ahead as we try to restore our customers as quickly and as safely as we can and we appreciate their patience. We know that this is not an ideal situation, but, you know, we’re confident that we are doing what we can do to address these issues and damage as quickly as we can and restore our customers,” Oshodi said.