Governor Wants Answers as Texans Still Have No Power

With around 270,000 homes and businesses still without power in the Houston area a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, the AP reports that Gov. Greg Abbott is demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area as well as answers about its preparations for upcoming storms. "Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious," Abbott said Sunday at his first news conference about Beryl since returning to the state from Asia. While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers since the storm hit on July 8, the slow pace of recovery has put the utility under mounting scrutiny over whether it was sufficiently prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the searing summer heat.

Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas requiring it to investigate why restoration has taken so long and what must be done to fix it. With months of hurricane season left, Abbott said he's giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it'll be doing to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. Abbott also said that CenterPoint didn't have "an adequate number of workers pre-staged" before the storm hit. The utility has said that it has brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston, and that it would have been unsafe to position those workers inside the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.

CenterPoint said its top priority was "power to the remaining impacted customers as safely and quickly as possible," adding that on Monday, the utility expects to have restored power to 90% of its customers. CenterPoint said it was committed to working with state and local leaders and to do a "thorough review of our response." CenterPoint also said Sunday that it's been "investing for years" to strengthen the area's resilience to such storms. A post Sunday on CenterPoint's website from CEO Jason Wells said that over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm and over 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, which impacted over 75% of the utility's distribution circuits.

(More Hurricane Beryl stories.)