HOUSTON – With growing frustrations toward CenterPoint Energy on restoration efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, it shouldn’t be a surprise there was just as much scrutiny from Houston lawmakers.
During the meeting at City Council on Wednesday morning, Brad Tutunjian, CenterPoint Energy’s vice president of regulatory affairs sought to bring transparency to the mounting tensions as more than 1 million customers remain without electricity.
Just before noon, he admitted that 560,000 City of Houston customers are without power; the rest of those without power are outside the city limits. Still, with unclear answers and growing frustrations on when the lights will be turned back on and why some areas have been restored and others haven’t, Tutunjian was certainly in the hot seat.
After Beryl swept through the Houston area, CenterPoint stated it would be mobilizing about 12,000 workers from outside Texas to assist in restoration efforts. This is after more than 2 million customers had their power out, but officials set the goal of restoring 1 million customers by the end of Wednesday.
However, Tutunjian told the City Council they were still caught off-guard by how much damage Beryl caused.
“We were fully prepared,” he said. “We called in what we thought was a good amount of resources. The storms are unpredictable, and you don’t know the extent of what that damage is going to be, so typically, we will ride out the storm, assess the damage, and then ask for crews.”
Tutunjian added that crews did not officially start rolling out to begin repairs until after the storm moved through the area, which was approximately 3 p.m. Monday.
“The preparation is in our response, and unfortunately when you have a hurricane that does damage to our facilities, it’s unfortunate the extent of damage that we have,” Tutunjian said.
By Tuesday night, CenterPoint confirmed it restored power to 1/3 of the customers without electricity. Earlier that day, we asked CenterPoint officials “What about the other million?” KPRC 2 was not given a clear timeline.
To alleviate tensions and the growing number of customers wondering when their lights would come on, CenterPoint Energy launched an online restoration map. The interactive map, which admittedly is not mobile-friendly, was meant to replace the “active outage” map, which was discontinued but is still facing scrutiny from viewers emailing KPRC 2 calling it inaccurate and misleading since some areas they live in marked “energized” were the opposite.
This could be due to a “nested outage,” according to Michelle Hundley from CenterPoint Media Relations. She told KPRC 2 digital producer Holly Galvan in May, “This occurs when, even after fixing the main issue, smaller problems still cause outages in specific areas. These secondary issues can arise from unseen damage or overloaded systems,” Hundley explained. “Another reason could be that customers on the same street might be on different electrical circuits.”
A blown-out transformer could also play a factor, which KPRC 2 Investigates Senior Producer Jason Nguyen examined in this report.
To which, Tutunjian responded, “We’re not going to focus on the transformers until we get the circuits on.”
Part of this, Tutunjian claims, was to make the system more resilient. This past April, Tutunjian says CenterPoint did a robust plan and filed it with the state as to what they would like to do differently called “a resiliency filing.”
“The world is different,” he said. “The storms are more frequent. They are more severe. Our paradigm has to change.”
The plans are meaningless though for customers, who are growing more impatient, especially on the heels of intense Texas heat.
“We are doing everything we can,” Tutunjian reassured. “We are in every area. We don’t segregate from one neighborhood to another.”
KPRC 2 Investigates Mario Diaz will have more on this in a live full report at 4:30 p.m.