MISSION BEND, Texas — As CenterPoint aims to meet an Aug. 31 deadline to complete the first phase of infrastructure resiliency improvements, one Houston-area neighborhood experienced a nearly two-day outage.
Cynthia Fisher has lived in her Mission Bend home since 1993. She told KHOU she has seen her fair share of storms and the outages that come with them. Because of those experiences, she understands the preparation needed once a warning of imminent problems comes.
But five weeks after Hurricane Beryl, she got an unpleasant surprise.
“No warning at all, I mean, Tuesday morning at 9:30, electricity went out,” Fisher said in an interview. “15 minutes later, got the notice from CenterPoint that the power would be back on at 12:33 p.m.”
Fisher thought the outage would be short-term, but emails she showed KHOU detail the numerous times CenterPoint told customers in the area an estimated time for restoration kept being pushed back as work continued.
“I stayed here because we kept on getting told that it'll be a few more hours, a few more hours,” Fisher said.
In the end, fisher said power did not return until late Wednesday night.
At one point, Fisher and other neighbors saw contracted linemen working in the neighborhood and asked them about the situation. She said they told her the work was part of efforts by CenterPoint to improve infrastructure resiliency. KHOU reported on the effort earlier this month, called the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative. The plan involves short-term and long-term efforts to try to prevent issues that came up with the utility in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl.
Gov. Greg Abbott demanded an accelerated timeline for short-term goals, which include replacing more than one thousand wooden poles with fiberglass ones, vegetation management and other efforts. The initial phase has a timeline of Aug. 31.
At the initiative’s rollout, CenterPoint said outages were to be expected, but that residents would be notified ahead of those expected outages.
However, due to the uncertainty and the length of the outage, Fisher was unable to salvage food and medication, including a month’s worth of insulin she needed.
She told KHOU she wished the utility’s communication would have been better.
“I would tell them that their communication needs to be real-time,” Fisher said. “Don't tell us what we want to hear, be real with us, don't sugarcoat.”
CenterPoint sent KHOU the following statement about the issue:
"We deeply apologize to our customers who experienced a prolonged outage as a result of the resiliency work being performed by one of our contractors. The pole replacement work took longer than expected and we missed an opportunity to proactively communicate with these customers. We are reaching out directly to each customer to express our sincere apologies and to address any concerns."