With a state-ordered investigation into CenterPoint underway and their executives on a tight timeline to deliver answers to Governor Abbott by next week, the power company issued a public apology Thursday over its Hurricane Beryl response.
They answered to The Public Utility Commission, which is now looking into the company’s response and performance. As a result, they are now promising to do a better job.
More than two million customers all across the Houston area were left in the dark after Beryl. Some didn’t get power for more than a week and were forced to live in dangerously hot conditions inside their homes with no air conditioning, while temperatures outside soared into the 90′s. Many of those who died lost their lives to heat illness.
Critics have questioned whether CenterPoint cut corners with maintaining trees around town. They also questioned whether the company was prepared with enough workers and if their resources were on par with industry standards.
CenterPoint’s CEO, Jason Wells agreed that his company has to do better.
“We know we frustrated our critical facility partners with chaotic communication around restoration times, coordination with when they could expect service, coordination of whether we could provide mobile generator backup,” Wells said. “All of that will be immediately streamlined for this hurricane season and we will continue to improve preparation for future storm seasons.”
Wells also insinuated that he inherited many of the company’s problems and has been working to improve CenterPoint’s operations.
“We hadn’t fully implemented the national management system incident command structure across the company. That was an improvement we put into place in 2023. There’s still a lot more work we need to do,” Wells said.
Moving forward, Wells promised better communication with customers and the completion of an outage tracker system that will use the smart meters that were installed in many of our homes.
“The smart meters were useful in our restoration efforts. However, they were not useful to our customers and for that, I apologize” he said.
Well said the outage tracker map didn’t work because it was overwhelmed during the derecho back in May.
“We are committed to bringing the outage tracker back by August 1. When we do have that outage tracker, it will be providing a benefit.”