People stuck in homes and apartments with no power are hot and the rhetoric slamming CenterPoint’s response to get it restored is getting heated.
Many of you are mad and emailing and calling us. You are demanding to know what is taking CenterPoint so long and why it is taking longer and longer to restore power after recent major weather events?
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Investigative reporter Amy Davis went back to look at the utility company’s efforts after Hurricane Ike in 2008. Was it actually faster?
If you were here in the Houston area in September 2008 you remember Hurricane Ike. But that was 16 years ago. We might not remember all the outages and the timeline for restoring power. Here it is.
It took 10 days to get the power restored to about 75% of those people or 1.6 million people. It then took another week to restore the remaining 546,000 customers. This is a total of 17 days.
By the end of the day Wednesday CenterPoint says 1 million people will have power back, that’s within 48 hours of losing it.
A few points from Investigator Amy Davis:
We aren’t saying it’s not miserable. We know it’s hot. (Of course, many of us from the station are without power and our crews are out in the heat, so we get it!)
Yes, we are investigating CenterPoint’s response and what it may have done or not done to harden the system to prevent outages like this.
But we just wanted to fact check those claims that the restoration is so much slower. So far that doesn’t appear to be true.
RELATED: Live power outage tracker