New CenterPoint map gives estimated date for Beryl-related restoration
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- CenterPoint Energy expects to have 85% of customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl outages back online by the end of the weekend.
The new estimation, coming Friday night, arrived as the company revamped its restoration map again to show estimated dates.
The map has eight color codes, including forest green, which represents areas already energized, and seafoam green, which indicates a "restoration date pending review."
All other colors have a date of either July 12, July 13, July 14, July 15, July 18, or July 19.
If viewing on mobile or if the map isn't viewable below, click here.
According to CenterPoint, remaining customers are those who are hardest hit with trees down in areas such as Brazoria County, Galveston County, and sections along the I-45 corridor to The Woodlands, including Montgomery County and Harris County.
As of 9:30 p.m. Friday, 678,931 customers remained without power. Power to some 1.5 million customers was restored.
As storms rolled in Friday and rain is expected again on Saturday, CenterPoint explained that the weather doesn't impact restoration efforts. Crews can continue to work in the rain unless there is lightning. The company did say crews paused work Friday due to safety concerns during Friday afternoon.
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In a post on social media, the company asked the public to keep distance from the crews and allow them to keep working.
"Safety is our number one priority. We have received numerous reports of threats being made to our employees and crews," CenterPoint wrote.
CenterPoint declared that, with 2.26 million customers impacted, this is the largest outage in the company's history.
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CenterPoint said that customers could experience prolonged outages while crews work to install new distribution poles, overhead conductors, and other critical electrical equipment in areas with significant structural damage.
Meanwhile, CenterPoint's CEO spoke for the first time since Hurricane Beryl in an exclusive interview with our partners at the Houston Chronicle.
He defended the company's response to the massive power outage, highlighting that they restored 1.1 million customers within 48 hours, claiming that's faster than other companies have done in the past 10 named storms.
Wells took ownership of communicating expectations with customers better.
His comments come after Acting Gov. Dan Patrick demanded an investigation be done into CenterPoint and whether it was prepared for the storm.
That sentiment was echoed by Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who on Friday formally reached out to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate CenterPoint Energy's "egregious and consistent service lapses (that) continue to endanger and threaten the lives of its customers."
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