Texas governor threatens utility company over remaining Beryl outages

July 14 (UPI) -- Texas Gov. Gregg Abbot has given Houston's dominant utility company a deadline to restore electricity to people who are still in the dark almost a week after hurricane Beryl barreled onshore in Southeast Texas, causing flooding and damaging straight line winds that took trees and power lines with them.

Abbot threatened in a news conference Sunday to issue an executive order requiring CenterPoint to improve the reliability of its equipment and storm preparedness in the wake of Beryl.

Abbot said CenterPoint has until July 31 to come up with an improvement plan or he would "impose my own requirements on CenterPoint that are geared to keep power on through hurricane season until the next legislative session," he said in the news conference.

At the height of the outage, 2.2 million people in and around the Houston suburbs were without power, and CenterPoint promised to have power restored to a majority of its customers by the weekend.

Abbott's action bolsters CenterPoint customer complaints over a lack of perceived progress in restoring power to residents of the suburbs of the nation's fourth most populous city. The utility created a service restoration map to give people an idea of when power might be restored, but even that was criticized by people who were suffering through the heat and humidity commonplace in the sweltering Houston summer.

Abbott called CenterPoint's lack of progress "completely unacceptable," and singled the company out, saying it "repeatedly failed to deliver power to customers for extended periods." Abbott said he will call on the Texas Public Utilities Commission to investigate CenterPoint's response to the mass power outages, but said the issue is pressing, and residents need to know these instances will not become commonplace this time of year.

"I will work with legislators to craft laws to improve power reliability, but, and here's the important part, we are still in hurricane season right now, and solutions cannot wait until the next session," Abbott said. "They are needed now to minimize power disruptions as we respond to tropical weather for the remainder of the summer and this fall, to help avoid more power outages during the remainder of hurricane season."

"Also, if CenterPoint does not comply, I will demand that the Public Utilities Commission reject CenterPoint's request to recover a profit and pending request before the public utilities commission," Abbot added.

Abbot said Centerpoint needs to do a better job removing trees and other vegetation near power lines, which are often the culprit in cutting electricity when powerful straight line gusts blow the trees into power lines.

Abbot also criticized CenterPoint for having a lack of trained workers to respond to the outages, training workers during the hurricane instead of before it happened.

"Maybe they have too large of an area for them to be able to manage adequately," Abbott said . "It's time to reevaluate whether or not CenterPoint should have such a large territory."