More than 2 million Houston-area customers without power, no clear timelines for return

More than 2 million customers remained without power as of mid-morning Tuesday, with no detailed timelines yet for electricity returning and temperatures starting to climb toward the 90s.

Nearly 1.8 million CenterPoint customers didn’t have power as of 10 a.m. Tuesday. About 800,000 customers had their power restored over the past 24 hours, CenterPoint said.

In a Monday night press release, the utility, which serves nearly all of Harris and Fort Bend counties, estimated about 1 million customers would get service restored by the end of Wednesday. Harder-hit areas, however, could see “prolonged outages,” CenterPoint officials said.

The company hasn’t released a detailed timeline for restoring power, citing the ongoing work to assess damage to its electric systems. Hurricane Beryl “more heavily impacted” Houston’s electric infrastructure than originally anticipated, causing widespread flooding, infrastructure damage and at least four deaths .

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“We are mobilizing all of our available resources, as well as mutual assistance resources from other utility companies, to begin the process of quickly and safely restoring power to our customers,” said Lynnae Wilson, a senior vice president at CenterPoint, in the press release. “We understand how difficult it is to be without power for any amount of time, especially in the heat. We are laser focused on the important and time-sensitive work that lies ahead.”

Seven thousand partner crews were en route to Houston to aid CenterPoint’s 3,000 local employees as of Monday afternoon, said Paul Lock, the company’s manager of local government relations, at an afternoon press conference.

Lock indicated that the company expects a clearer picture of the restoration timeline to emerge sometime Tuesday.

Suburban counties still out

About 230,000 customers served by Entergy and Texas-New Mexico Power in Greater Houston’s suburban counties also were without power.

Entergy reported about 156,000 customers remained without power in Montgomery County as of 10 a.m. Tuesday. About 17,000 Entergy customers in Liberty County and 6,000 customers in Galveston County also were without power.

Entergy officials have not released a timeline for restoring power as of Tuesday morning, though they cautioned it could take “several days.”

Texas-New Mexico Power reported about 40,000 customer outages in Galveston County and 34,000 customer outages in Brazoria County as of 10 a.m. Tuesday. The utility hasn’t released restoration timelines as of Tuesday morning.

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CenterPoint outage tracker still not available

As CenterPoint works to restore service to the region, the millions of Houstonians without power continue to lack a critical resource for tracking electrical outages and restoration timelines: CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker.

The Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area highlighting areas affected by outages, has been offline since May due to “technical difficulties” caused by the derecho that swept through Harris County that month, CenterPoint officials said.

On Sunday, a CenterPoint representative said the company would replace the Outage Tracker with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July. In the meantime, the company pointed to its Storm Center , which updates general outage information every fifteen minutes, and its Power Alert service, which provides community-specific restoration information via text, email or phone.

But the lack of clarity around the extent of power outages and restoration timelines caused consternation among CenterPoint customers eager for updates after the derecho.

CenterPoint maintains the systems that deliver power to nearly all residents of Harris and Fort Bend counties, along with some other corners of Greater Houston. In total, about 2.8 million Houstonians rely on CenterPoint, according to the company.

CenterPoint has long contended with major weather events resulting in widespread outages. Hurricane Ike, a Cat 2 storm that battered Greater Houston in 2008, resulted in power outages to nearly 2.2 million CenterPoint customers. Some were still without electricity nearly two weeks later.