A week after a deadly windstorm left nearly 1 million homes, businesses and schools in the Houston area without electricity, tens of thousands were still waiting for power to be restored.
Nearly 19,000 customers were without electricity as of early Thursday afternoon, according to CenterPoint Energy, which supplies power to the region. That number has gradually dwindled since May 16, when a derecho swept across the region and produced two tornadoes while causing at least eight deaths and damaging buildings, trees and infrastructure – including CenterPoint’s downtown headquarters as well as a significant portion of its infrastructure.
A total of about 922,000 customers lost power during the peak of the storm, according to CenterPoint, which said it had restored electricity to more than 900,000 of them as of noon Thursday. The company said it had replaced more than 800 miles in electrical wires, more than 700 transformers and about 2,000 utility poles during that time.
“While we are very proud of the progress we have made over the course of our response to this storm event, we recognize that there are still Houstonians waiting to get their electricity back on,” Lynnae Wilson, a senior vice president for CenterPoint, said in a news release. “We want our customers to know we will continue our around-the-clock efforts until every last customer can be restored.”
The areas most impacted by the ongoing outages, according to CenterPoint’s website, are Bellaire, Cypress, Greenspoint and Spring Branch. There were at least 4,200 outages in each of those locales as of noon Thursday, with the Baytown and Humble areas having at least 600 outages apiece.
CenterPoint said the remaining outages are “predominantly isolated instances in certain locations where there is substantial damage or where customers are unable to receive power.” The company said Wednesday that some outages were expected to extend into the Memorial Day weekend, when daily high temperatures in the Houston area are forecasted to reach the low- to mid-90s, according to the National Weather Service.
MORE: CenterPoint’s Eric Easton discusses power restoration efforts on Houston Matters
CenterPoint has said there could be instances in which some Houston-area residents have power but their neighbors do not, because of what the company described as a “nesting outage” in which the primary problem was fixed but there could be smaller, secondary issues related to unseen damage or overloaded systems. Homes on the same street might also be on different electrical circuits, which could result in varied restoration times.
RELATED: FEMA urges Houston-area residents impacted by storm to apply for disaster assistance
CenterPoint also encouraged impacted customers to check for damage in localized equipment such as weatherheads, which are the points where power enters homes. Weatherheads often are pipes located on the sides of homes or buildings, according to the company.
“If the weatherhead is damaged, we cannot safely restore service to the home until a licensed electrician has made the necessary repairs,” CenterPoint said earlier this week. “Customers who are served by an underground service will not have a weatherhead, but there may still be damage to their equipment that could require servicing.”
CenterPoint offered the following safety tips for Houston-area residents who remain without electricity or are engaging in cleanup efforts.
- Stay at least 35 feet away from downed power lines and damaged utility equipment. Be mindful of downed lines that could be hidden, and treat all downed lines as if they are energized.
- Be cautious around work crews and give them plenty of room to assess damage and make repairs.
- Use a portable generator only in a well-ventilated area. Never run it indoors or in a garage in order to avoid carbon monoxide fumes, which can be deadly.
- Never connect a portable generator directly to your building’s electrical system during a power outage as electricity could flow back into the power lines and potentially endanger workers or members of the public.
