Posted on 07/12/2024 5:27:17 AM PDT by Zhang Fei
CenterPoint is a $19 billion, for-profit corporation granted a monopoly over a hundred years ago to manage and maintain the transmission and distribution of electricity across the Houston region. This regulated utility failed to deliver power to 85% of its customers during the height of a mild hurricane.
In a perfect world, the Public Utility Commission would have ensured CenterPoint maintained a grid resilient enough to withstand a stronger storm. Instead, elected officials are asking the wrong questions about the emergency response.
“I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews were, when they were asked to come in and how quickly they get power back. That will be the tale of the tape.” Patrick said earlier this week.
Wrong. The important question is, why did so many CenterPoint powerlines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away? These are CenterPoint’s primary responsibilities for which they receive a guaranteed profit from customer bills, and they didn’t fulfill them.
CenterPoint officials have stammered their responses.
“What we've seen now is more impact than what we originally thought that we were going to see,” Alyssia Oshodi, CenterPoint Director of Communications, told KHOU television.
CenterPoint had plenty of warnings. So is the problem shoddy maintenance work by CenterPoint subcontractors after the company trimmed 700 employees since 2020 to boost profits? Did the company cheap out on materials and engineering standards? Does the company believe blacking out 85% of its customers in a category 1 hurricane is acceptable?
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonchronicle.com ...
[You cannot really bury high tension in a swamp and Houston is built on a swamp.]
Well, they can’t so fair enough. I didn’t read it all. just not enough hours in the day.
I lived in HK for 25 years and have the equivalent of a “Green Card” there. I lived in Singapore for a year and know it well. The difference is population density. And in at least HK there is a significant amount of higher ground and underlying volcanic rock. Houston is flat and the coastal soil is deep and bedrock hard to reach. The water table is close to the surface. But in some ways, you are right about HK. Our car floated out to see during a typhoon in HK but the power stayed on or was only out for a short time
In Houston, we live 62 miles as the Interstate runs from the beach at the Galveston seawall and a measly 63 feet above sea level in extreme Northern Houston. That makes drainage a real issue that Hong Kong doesn’t face.
The city government should have put building and construction codes in place since at least the 1960s to address the issue. My example is Guam. Our house there was made of concrete blocks with a poured reinforced concrete roof and ceramic floors with 155mph wind-rated windows. The house was cool even without AC due to the construction. Houston should build houses like that rather than the 2x4 stud and brick veneer.
ggg
The author is a liberal who used to work for the AP and wrote a book with a clearly agitating title for Texans called "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth."
While I am sympathetic to some of the issues he raised in the article (my power, internet, cable, and telephone were out for six days -- it's a good thing I had a standby whole-house generator), the author uses the disaster to take overt swipes at Gov. Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Yes, I would also like to know why power lines and telephone poles snapped in gale force winds in The Woodlands area. Many people ask why the power lines haven't been buried underground after all these years. Many trees also fell onto roadways and live power lines, so there is something about the strength of the wood that's been in the Houston heat and humidity for many, many years.
Getting the power back online was the priority, but the fallen trees slowed down the response until the roads could be cleared just to get to the blown substations, transformers, and damaged transmission lines.
And the overall power grid is just as confusing and sprawling as the roadways in the larger Houston area. It would be nice to reconfigure the grid so that long daisy-chained connections to neighborhood can be streamlined and localized instead of crisscrossed like each area was plugged into the most convenient line at the time.
But those issues aside, this article was really a veiled attack on Abbot, Patrick, and Paxton by a former AP writer.
-PJ
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