Power restoration slow, but steady {From Ike

Power companies continued restoring electricity to customers in and around Houston Saturday, yet by the end of the day more than a million homes and businesses remained in the dark.

Progress was slow as the companies began the tedious task of renewing power to one block or one house at a time after completing key infrastructure repairs in recent days.

Even so, three of the four major power companies serving the area reported gains, while the other did not release updated figures Saturday.

The word comes a full week after Hurricane Ike slammed into the Texas coast and cut a messy trail through Houston. It also suggested power companies are slowly chipping away at the largest blackout in Texas' history.

But it's little comfort to Houstonians like Datonya Fountain, who on Saturday was approaching her breaking point after seven days without power.

"I'm pretty sick and tired of it," said Fountain, 39, who lives with her 13 month-old daughter in Shepherd Forest, a neighborhood slightly northwest of Loop 610.

Today, CenterPoint Energy said that as of 8 a.m. there were 819,000 customers, or 36 percent, without power in its service territory. But 1.44 million customers, or 64 percent, in Houston and most of its surrounding suburbs have electricity, CenterPoint Energy officials said. That was down from 50 percent on Friday.

Entergy Texas, with customers to the north and east of Houston, reported the biggest jump Saturday.

As of midday today, it said 19 percent of customers were without power, down from 45 percent the day before.

...

Sam Houston Electric Cooperative, with customers in 10 counties east and north of Houston, also reported increases Saturday. As of late morning, roughly 35 percent of its distribution system is still without power, down from 47 percent Friday, company spokeswoman Mary Kate Scott said.

Texas-New Mexico Power Co., with 115,000 customers in Galveston, Brazoria and Matagorda counties, said at 11 a.m. today about 20 percent of its customers were without power.

We are still without power in my area. I haven’t seen a Centerpoint truck in our neighborhood since the storm. The worrisome thing is that when you call, half the people who answer say their computer shows we have power. We tell them some folks in our area have power, but there are power lines laying in the ditch one street over and we do not have power. There are trucks in the area today, but not our neighborhood. I am afraid they will move on to another area as we fall through the cracks. I’m spending a fortune on propane keeping my generator going, but at least I can make power. Thank the Lord for the cool front this week. It is warming up again though. If they think they are getting complaints now, wait for a couple of 95 degree high humidity days!

We're north of 290 between the two loops. We still don't have power, and I have not seen a single Centerpoint truck in the area. (We're staying at a friend's house in the meantime.) Today we drove down a very nearby street and there a tree had fallen into the road knocking out a line and leaving said line suspended about precariously 10 feet above the street. Obviously someone knows about this since the line was tagged and the tree had been trimmed back from the road somewhat. Driving down a major street coming back from church, we saw a electrical pole splintered at the bottom thus causing the pole to lean most of the way across one side of the four lane road. It looks like it could fall at any moment, and even if it's not energized could kill someone driving from the impact.

I'll accept to a certain degree that the damage was massive and that that's slowing things down somewhat. But I'm fairly disturbed by Centerpoint’s performance so far. Aside from the examples I just gave, their website is a good indicator of a lack of preparation for this type of situation. Initially, they just had it updated with a pdf of a list of outages by zip code along with a worthless overall outage map. Then, after 4 or 5 days they finally got a map of restoration times up on the website, but again there wasn't enough detail to make it very useful, just big blotches of various shades of blue. Finally, they've made a more detailed map with restoration estimates by zip code, but that hasn't been updated for a few days. Only a couple days ago, they finally put an FAQ on their website answering some very important questions everyone is having. They're basically making their plans for relaying info to their customers up on the spot.

When I lived in St. Louis several years ago, we had two large power outages in a year from a windstorm first and then an icestorm. I was able to go over to school, which had power and internet, and check Ameren’s website to check on the restoration progress. They had a dynamic, zoomable, detailed map with outages divided by zip code that was constantly updated as more people came back online. I was able to sign in and check the status of my individual apartment which included the time the outage occured, the cause (fallen tree), the number of people affected by that specific outage (which was very useful to estimate how big a priority they'd probably see it as), and a restoration time estimate (which they met). Centerpoint has none of that. They say we should have power back tomorrow in our zip code, but with 8000 (50%) customers still offline according to their list, I doubt it.

I've been appalled that the 4th largest city in the country and probably the number one economy right now can basically just shut down for two to three weeks, and this is deemed acceptable. Centerpoint was even telling people to prepare to be out of power for two to three weeks before the storm. The city is covered with brand new buildings being fed by these ancient, flimsy power lines on poles. Almost all places I've seen that have underground electrical lines have power. Centerpoint responds to that in their FAQ by saying that underground lines make diagnosis of problems harder and are prone to flooding. So it sounds like they're just planning to maintain the status quo instead of thinking about upgrading the infrastructure and plan on going through this again with the next storm. We'll be doing research on generators before then.

To everyone in other states who's lost power from Ike, my prayers are with you, and I hope they're using all the personnel they've drawn from all over the country as efficiently as possible down here so they can get back to restore you guys ASAP. </rant>

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