HOUSTON – Hurricane Beryl has left, but nearly 2 million Houston-area residents are still without power.
On Monday, CenterPoint Energy told KPRC 2 digital producer Christian Terry it expects to have power restored to 1 million customers “by the end of the day on Wednesday.”
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During a follow-up interview Tuesday morning, live on KPRC 2+ with CenterPoint’s Director of Communications, Alyssia Oshodi, KPRC 2 reporter Haley Hernandez asked “What about the other half?”
In short, Oshodi says it’s hard to say but after completing their damage assessment by Wednesday, CenterPoint will be able to have a better idea. Residents in the hardest-hit areas may be without power for longer.
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Here’s a full transcript of their interview:
Haley Hernandez: You have the most important information that everybody in the southeast region wants to know is, when are we going to have our power restored?
Alyssia Oshodi: Sure. So we have crews out working very hard to restore power to our customers in the greater Houston area. Really, in our first full day of restoration efforts following Hurricane Beryl. And so, we’ve got crews, we will have nearly 12,000 people that will be working our system to restore power. Right now, we’re really in that damage assessment period. So that’s going to continue for likely another 24 hours. But in the meantime, we’re making some steady progress on restoration.
H.H. What is the difference between damage assessment and restoring the power?
A.O. Sure. Let me break that down a little bit. So we’ve seen significant damage to the system. So what we need to do is get out there. We’ve got some cut and clear efforts happening right now. So removing debris off of our, our facilities, off of lines, off of our equipment, we have then inspectors that are coming in and really giving a visual representation of the damage there so that we can appropriately bring the right crews and equipment out to then make the repairs. So there’s a lot of damage assessment that needs to be completed. We’ve been doing that since yesterday, once the storm cleared, and going to continue those efforts into tomorrow. But like I said, you know, restoration is happening. It’ll continue to ramp up as we can complete that damage assessment.
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H.H. Okay, good. And I know that.
H.H. You know, we talked to the City of Houston earlier, and they were saying that. Yeah, there are crews also coming from across the state and across the nation, which it seems like what we need right now. Right? I mean, we’re seeing video of linemen heading out. And I know that you said we’ve got close to 12,000 crews, but, it feels like it can’t come fast enough when we see the heat index of 105.
A.O. Absolutely. And we want to say thank you to all those mutual assistance crews that are coming from other utilities to assist us in those efforts. They’re going to continue to enter the area today and tomorrow, and then we’ll be fully ramped up on our system and working. We understand it. It’s hot and it’s an inconvenience to not have power. So we are working as quickly as we can to get our folks back on.
H.H. Yeah, it’s an inconvenience, but it’s a safety hazard. You know, there are people who can’t survive in this type of heat. So we really we really hope that it can be restored quickly. And I know you said about half of the people who are without power right now will have it restored by, you know, tomorrow evening. But what does that mean for the other half?
A.O. Correct. So by the end of day [Wednesday], based on the assessment we’ve completed up to this point in restoration progress, we’ll have 1 million customers that have been impacted back on. But as you said, that still leaves virtually half of the customers, another 1 million customers. We’ll continue to work and we’ll have some more detailed information again as we can complete the damage assessment portion to establish some timelines for folks. But we do know that some of our hardest-hit areas, we should expect that folks will be without power for several days.
H.H. So some of the hardest hit areas when you look at the outage map, you know, it looks like central Houston really inside the loop was pretty hard hit. Does that mean that that’s who we’re talking to, that you guys…
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