HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — After beginning Monday with about 240,000 outages, CenterPoint Energy had yet to restore about 132,000 customers during the evening.
The company also gave an update on when all impacted customers would have their lights back on after Hurricane Beryl: Friday, July 19, some 11 days after the Category 1 storm made landfall.
As of 8:30 p.m. Monday, 92% of impacted customers were restored. About 98% should be restored by the end of Wednesday, CenterPoint added.
The company also cautioned about damage to customer-owned, specifically weatherheads, the point where power enters the home through an electric service drop, which is often a pipe located on the side of the residence or building.
“If the weatherhead is damaged, crews cannot safely restore service to the home until a licensed electrician has made the necessary repairs. Customers who are served by an underground service will not have a weatherhead, but there may still be damage to their equipment that could require servicing,” CenterPoint warned.
A weeklong wait continues
It has been the same tune for many families in the seven days since the storm, with households growing impatient that their lights and air conditioning remained off.
ABC13 viewers told Eyewitness News Houston’s Third Ward is one of those neighborhoods.
On the CenterPoint outage tracker,the company labels the area as energized with potential localized outages, otherwise categorized as nested outages.
The term should sound familiar. Eyewitness News reported it recently after May’s derecho when CenterPoint had outages three times smaller than Beryl.
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Just like May’s report, CenterPoint Energy explained what’s happening in a statement Monday:
“There might be several reasons why some customers may have their power restored while others nearby are still without power. One reason could be a ‘nested outage.’ A nested outage occurs when, even after fixing the main issue, other isolated issues, such as damage to fuses, transformers, meters, electric lines, or other electric infrastructure, cause continued outages in specific areas. These secondary issues can arise from unseen damage or overloaded systems.
Another reason could be that customers on the same street or neighborhood might be on different electric circuits. Customers on different circuits can experience varied restoration times because each circuit may have different levels of damage or may be repaired in a different sequence. This means that while one circuit is fully restored, another might still be undergoing repairs.
The restoration map reflects a circuit-level outage. Therefore, a customer who is still out on a circuit showing green might be experiencing a more localized issue. Customers enrolled in Power Alert Service are receiving individual restoration alerts as their power is restored. We continue to assess our system and update the information regularly.
A circuit-level outage generally includes locations with more than 100 customers impacted. If your grocery stores, streetlights and surrounding neighborhoods are without power, the problem may be at the circuit level.”
CenterPoint said it’s directing 14,000 crew members on 16-hour shifts to work on restoration.
“These crews have walked more than 8,500 miles of electric lines, removed nearly 19,000 weakened trees impacting lines, repaired or replaced more than 2,100 poles, and deployed 28 mobile generation units to temporarily restore to cooling centers, hospitals, senior living facilities, and water treatment plants,” the company said.
Despite the effort, some ABC13 viewers said the company told them power would remain off until Friday.
