More than 300,000 homes remain without power in Texas after Beryl

A week after Hurricane Beryl struck Texas, about 350,000 homes and businesses remain without power in the Houston area. Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday he is demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area.

CenterPoint Energy, the electric company, had restored power to about 1.9 million customers since the storm hit on July 8, but the slow pace of recovery has put the utility under increasing scrutiny over whether it was prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the scorching summer heat, The Associated Press reported.

Governor Abbott has sent a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas asking it to investigate why it has taken so long to restore power to thousands of people and what needs to be done to fix it.

Transmission lines down during Beryl

In the Houston area, Beryl knocked out transmission lines, uprooted trees and snapped branches that crashed into power lines, knocking them offline, but many homes and businesses remain without power.

Abbott said he will give CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it will do to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He said that will include the company providing detailed plans for removing vegetation that still threatens power lines.

According to the governor, CenterPoint did not have “an adequate number of pre-scheduled workers” before the storm hit.

90% of service will be restored

CenterPoint issued a statement stressing that it expected power to be restored to 90% of its customers by the end of the day on Monday, July 15.

And he made clear that they were prepared for the storm with 12,000 additional workers arriving in Houston, but that putting personnel in the impact zone could have been dangerous.

Beryl struck Houston, damaging 2,100 utility poles and removing more than 18,600 trees from power lines, affecting more than 75 percent of the utility’s distribution circuits.

With information from AP

Keep reading:

• Heat alerts return to New York City area
• Last June was the warmest on record, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information
• Two people died in Vermont due to flooding caused by Beryl