Posted on 07/13/2024 8:21:06 PM PDT by george76
Nearly a million Texans were still without power on Friday. And the utility company with the most outages was facing threats of violence.
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HOUSTON — 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.
CenterPoint's power restoration progress Roughly 87% of CenterPoint's 2.6 million customers lost power after Hurricane Beryl tore through the Houston region. The utility has warned that hundreds of thousands will remain without electricity into next week. Here's a look at it's progress so far.
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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.
The company had to evacuate over 100 lineworkers from a substation after shots were fired at their crews on Saturday morning, CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells said in a social media video. The individual responsible was promptly arrested, according to Wells.
“This is unacceptable,” Wells said in that video. “The safety of our crews is paramount.”
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.”
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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.
Generator Salesman of the Century, Jason Wells.
At this point, nearly 2 million Houston area residents want to know exactly where this fella, Jason Wells, and his $37 million per year compensation package is located right this very damn minute.
We simply want to turn off his… pic.twitter.com/WZVn4h0KAm— JosephLTrahan (@JosephLTrahan) July 11, 2024
What’s Governor Wheelchair doing?
Is Gov Abbot’s tenure to blame at all? It seems like Texans were caught between rock and hard place between him and Beto.
Renewables can only a be a secondary source to generate primary level source power. Use it to create hydrogen or use it to charge a battery that can be used to run a household for a day.
Biden is supposed to be in Austin on Monday
Probably nothing, as usual.
They think this is bad?
Wait for the zombie apocalypse..or even worse the leftist apocalypse.
Gee, I thought we had it bad here in Commiefornia. I’d better check in on my friend in Texas.
And shooting at utility workers ain’t the answer, folks. No matter how long the power’s been out.
First off, how does this compare to the winter storm outage the other year? I know the show 10 steps to Disaster or whatever sure put a liberal spin on it.
5 days doesn’t seem so bad considering a storm went through hitting millions.
We had no power for 5 or more days after Irene went through. Basement had flooded due to sump pump failing again and borrowed a friends generator to run it. Not fun but we handled it. Not too shocked at storm causing week-long outages.
Save the venom for the Texas legislature, including some GOP members, who insisted on going to far with green energy and not spending the money to harden the electrical grid after the February 2021 “storm of the century”.
dint they have a big power outage a few winters ago???
nothing changed?
Ankle biting douche bag.
This is Houston — the rectum of Texas. I honestly don’t give a damn.
Oh totally
When I got hit by Katrina, power wasn’t on for two weeks
I live in D.C. This is the big chronic problem here whenever we get a wind, ice or snow storm. The utilities do a great job of fixing the big problems but thousands of downed lines in the leafy green suburbs take time to fix. Sometimes heavy snow and unplowed roads exacerbate the problem (on those scattered occasions when a nor'easter decides to drop 15-20 inches on us).
Without fail, the suburbanites mostly think that their trees are sacred and their power lines should be buried. At someone else's expense, of course. From time to time, the utilities work up the cost projections for buried powerlines and the implications for people's utility bills, and the clamor tends to die down again.
I bet CenterPoint charges the customers even though they did not have electricity...!
Customer fights for months and months to correct bill and is ignored.
The DWP here in the San Fernando valley in Calif does this all the time with water bills and electric bills.
Extremely bad situation. The problem this time isn’t generation, but poor maintenance on the distribution circuits. And even then, if a tree is taller than 15-30’ you can’t do anything when a tree falls into a line and poles snap. Have family that still out of power and temps in the 90’s. Miserably hot in Houston with all that humidity.
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