HOUSTON — Editor's note: This article was originally published in the Texas Tribune here.
Eating becomes more difficult when the power is out.
Ovens, refrigerators, microwaves, and electric stove tops become obsolete. L. Myra Gainous’ shopping cart displayed that at an H-E-B grocery store Friday afternoon. As the 83-year-old Houstonian left the store, her cart was stocked with chips, bread and fruit snacks — food she can eat until her electricity returns.
Gainous is one of nearly 1 million customers still living without power five days after Hurricane Beryl walloped the Texas’ Gulf Coast. The largest concentration of customers without power remains in Harris County, the nation’s third most populous county.
CenterPoint, the Houston-based electric utility that serves Harris and other surrounding counties, reported about 820,000 customers still did not have power Friday afternoon. And the company is scurrying to restore power across the area. Many of those customers may have to wait until next week to be reconnected.
“CenterPoint is the one that’s charging us,” Gainous said bluntly, “so they need to fix something quick.”
CenterPoint’s pace for restoring power has been faster than in recent storms. Yet, the Texas summer heat — the region is under a heat advisory by the National Weather Service — coupled with poor communication from the utility company is bringing tension to a boil.
Some are getting creative: A mural under Interstate 10 and shared on social media read “CenterPointle$$.”
In other cases, customer frustration has turned violent. A man in Fort Bend County has been charged with pulling a BB or airsoft gun on a CenterPoint worker evaluating the area, ABC 13 reported.
“People are angry at the situation and the heat just by nature makes us all more frustrated and the tempers run higher, but these folks are here just to help us," said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, addressing the violence during a news conference. “And they’re working very hard for us, and very quickly for us, these linemen. So please please do not take it out on them.”
And state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican, wrote on social media that a CenterPoint staging site had received a threat of a drive-by shooting and had to relocate. CenterPoint confirmed the threat, saying that the site is now only being used to store materials. The Houston Police Department reported that a security guard learned about the threat second-hand, which was made due to the ongoing power outages. CenterPoint called the violent conduct “counter-productive” to getting the power back on.
Not all residents are prepared to point the finger at CenterPoint. Many of the outages were caused by trees on private property falling on power lines, CenterPoint said. That point hasn’t slipped Houston resident Alex Paredes’ mind. Paredes says that the responsibility falls on everyone, noting that officials are not incharge of trees on personal property that are overlooking power lines.
“I think homeowners bear some kind of responsibility as far as trees overlooking the power lines,” Paredes said. “No city officials are in charge of that.”
CenterPoint said in a press release that they have had tree crews working on lines “as soon as it was safe to go out after the hurricane passed.” CenterPoint maintains they are dedicated to restoring power across their customer-base.
“We are encouraged by the tremendous progress we have made as we track ahead of our restoration expectations. We are not going to stop until every impacted customer is back online,” said Lynnae Wilson, a CenterPoint Senior Vice President of Electric Business.
Conflict has only been exacerbated by blundered communications during the early days of the disaster. Two days into the outages and there was still no timeline on when power would be back. And the CenterPoint utilities map hadn’t worked since May, with Houstonians turning to a map of opened and closed Whataburgers to see where electricity was flowing.
Elected officials have also expressed frustration with the utility, calling the persistent outages unacceptable. Gov. Greg Abbott told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday that he wants the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates electricity in the state, to do a study on why the outages are lasting so long. He said that will include a look at whether staffing issues or flaws in the infrastructure were culprits. Abbott’s office did not respond to requests from The Texas Tribune for more information about what such an inquiry will entail.
Nim Kidd, the Texas Division of Emergency Management chief, said it will be up to the PUC to determine "whatever fines, fees or regulations” CenterPoint should face. The utility appeared before the PUC on Thursday, but regulators didn’t mention any potential fines — or rules that the utility may have violated. Commission Chair Thomas Gleeson told the company it needs to better communicate with customers — but didn't criticize its pace or staffing levels.
At that same meeting, CenterPoint updated regulators on its progress restoring power to millions of people over a wide swath of land that was battered by hurricane-force winds.
“We have never restored more than a million customers a little over two days after a hurricane before and you can only do that with significant readiness,” Jason Ryan, the company’s executive vice president of regulatory services and government affairs, told state regulators.