Houstonians left in the dark by CenterPoint turn to social media to tackle power outages

Julia Dimmitt thought she was reading the map wrong.

The retired Houston ISD area superintendent kept checking to see when power would be restored to her East End home, but CenterPoint Energy’s color-coded outage tracker seemed to ignore her address.

“I kept thinking, ‘Am I not reading this correctly?’” she said Wednesday evening, hours after her power had been restored.

Last Thursday’s deadly windstorm knocked out power to 922,000 CenterPoint customers across the Houston area, according to Brad Tutunjian, CenterPoint’s vice president of regulatory policy. For those left in dark and sweltering homes as temperatures reached the low 90s over the weekend, that lack of power amounted to a pressing emergency after the fast-moving storm had left town.

An absence of readily accessible and available information from CenterPoint, which experienced its own outage after a surge of website traffic led its outage tracker to crash, further added to the sting.

Houstonians who felt left in the dark in more ways than one by their power company rallied on social media to help keep each other informed. In some instances, locals were able to flag elected officials about misinformation on the outage maps and ask for help restoring their power .

Five days after the storm, more than 100,000 people remained without power. Desperate, they turned to social media to plead with CenterPoint for help or guidance about when they might see their power turned back on. Vardeman said a strategy that the energy company should look at in the future is responding to even more people individually, and improving its mapping tools or power-restoration estimates.

“People are desperate,” she said. “They’re trying to find whatever way they can to get CenterPoint to come and give them their power back. They were still allowing comments (on social media) but they’re not engaging at the kind of personal level that I think people are wanting.”

CenterPoint’s power outage map goes down

Lory Rutledge was one of the few who did receive a direct response from CenterPoint on social media.

“Not a single truck in sight since it all began,” she wrote on X, accompanied by a photo of massive trees blocking streets near her home in Spring Branch’s Shadow Oaks subdivision. “Still no power, website says it was restored yesterday.”

Rutledge said she had called CenterPoint but found more success with social media. For one, she received a direct reply from CenterPoint , which asked Rutledge to report the outage via a direct message. And like Dimmitt, she also heard from Garcia, who requested her exact location.

“It’s easier to make a post, because people are outspoken and they’re more capable of expressing their thoughts and concerns when they’re not on the telephone, and they have time to think through what they’re going to say,” she said Thursday after her power was restored. “I think that’s one of the benefits of social media.”

Still, she remains dismayed that she had to take things into her own hands. Throughout her six days without power, she said she felt gaslit and lied to by the energy company.

CenterPoint’s primary outage tracker map was often not working properly following the storm. Eventually, the company switched to a different page that showed the number of outages along with the number of customers affected and restored, but it lacked its usual interactive map that Houstonians have come to rely upon during such disasters. It then posted static images showing the projected restoration schedules before its interactive map was fixed; even then, many customers reported problems with it.

The company said it was aware that many homes without power were not properly reflected on that map, due to “nested outages,” which affect small subsets of homes without impacting larger neighborhoods.

“It was frustrating, this map that they have that was not accurate ever, and it would say, ‘You’re going to be restored on this day,’ but it would come and go, and you don’t see anybody,” Rutledge said. “And then it says you were restored, but you weren’t.”

“We were ready to respond to a storm, but not ready to respond to a storm of this magnitude,” CenterPoint’s Tutunjian told City Council on Wednesday.

CenterPoint set a goal to have 98 percent of customers back online by the end of Wednesday — a huge win when calculated by percentages. With nearly 1 million people knocked out of service during the storm,  “even at 98 percent, that’s still about 20,000 customers that are without power,” Tutunjian said.

It took until Thursday afternoon for the total number of homes still without power to dip below 20,000, according to the company’s outage tracker .

Broken trust

More than 7,000 lineworkers joined the slow slog toward restoration —  some from as far away as New Mexico and Missouri.

“Immediately after the storm there’s a lot of questions regarding, ‘How long is it going to be?’” Tutunjian said. “And the challenge for the utility is we have to be able to understand exactly what is the extent of the damage on our facilities. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s with boots on the ground.”

Dimmitt and Rutledge said they understand the effort the utility company had to undertake, but they cannot ignore the problems they encountered.

Strickland said he expects CenterPoint will do a “self examination” to determine what went wrong. Once that is done, he said it would be beneficial to the energy company to send its customers a letter or email to address the missteps and how it plans to avoid those in the future.

“They’ll take a hit at the beginning of this, but at the end if they can show people that they are trying to address these situations, they’ll come out on top and advance their image even further,” he said.

Vardeman, the crisis communications expert, said she believes that CenterPoint lost much of the community’s trust throughout the disaster and hopes that within the company months that the company will take the time to solicit feedback from customers through social media and in-person town hall meetings about how to improve future communications.

“I genuinely believe that talking to people directly, even when they’re upset at you about something, talking directly and finding out what it is that they want and how they want the relationship to go is going to be most fruitful for them,” she said.