HOUSTON — The CEO of CenterPoint Energy spoke out on the restoration process as crews continue to work on restoring power to customers in the Houston area following Hurricane Beryl.
CenterPoint President and CEO Jason P. Wells was featured in a video posted to the company’s YouTube channel Thursday evening where he discussed the company’s preparation and walked through their restoration process with a line crew assisting from Pennsylvania.
As of 8:30 a.m. Friday, there were just over 877,000 customers without power. That’s down from nearly 2.3 million customers without power at the peak of the outage following Beryl.
RELATED: CenterPoint says they expect to have 80% of impacted customers restored by the end of Sunday
“In fact, in the first 48 hours we restored nearly half of our customers after that storm,” Wells said in the video. “That restoration would not have been possible without extensive preparation in advance of the storm making its way here, as well as extensive investments in our system, improving our resiliency.”
The company also promised to have estimated restoration dates for 70% of customers who are currently without power by Thursday night. By Friday, they said they should be able to provide restoration dates for substantially all impacted customers.
“We know we have more to do. We still have a little over a million customers remaining without power, we are not going to stop working until each of those customers is back and restored,” Wells said. The number had dropped to 854 by 1:30 p.m. Friday.
In the video, Wells said that they are seeing more extensive damage from the hurricane that would require more work.
During the video, Wells is shown talking with the crew about what steps they go through to make repairs, saying that machinery has to be brought in and tree limbs have to be removed to ensure that it is safe to work.
The head of the crew spoke about the restoration process, including the trouble with setting new poles and dealing with easements.
He explained that a job like the one they were on could take up a full shift, if not more.
Part of the frustration with the millions of people who lost power when the Category 1 storm slammed the Greater Houston area was the lack of information or updates and the inaccurate restoration maps.
On Thursday morning, the Public Utilities Commission met with executives that serve Southeast Texas.
PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson advised CenterPoint to improve communications with customers to rebuild trust.
"The public expects more communication, more frequent communication, different modes of communication. I think it's incumbent on all of that as we look at the way we communicate going forward," Gleeson said.
Gleeson reminded CenterPoint that their job is far from over and would go on until all power is finally restored.
"I would strenuously urge you all, once everything is restored, to get out in the community whether that's town halls, talk to customers about what happened, ways you can improve," Gleeson said. "Get feedback from them about their view on what can be improved, and I think that will make the next time there's a storm, make this go a lot better."
CenterPoint said it would follow up with how it intends to communicate more effectively with customers when it submits its after-action report to the PUC.