Tropical Storm Francine is CenterPoint’s first test after Beryl

CenterPoint Energy, the troubled Houston-area power company, said it is “urgently planning and preparing” for Tropical Storm Francine, which is expected to make landfall in Louisiana as a hurricane on Wednesday and will be the company’s first major test since Hurricane Beryl left more than 2.2 million Houston-area residents without power in July.

Although Francine is not expected to have a direct impact on Houston, the company is preparing for the worst-case scenario, CenterPoint leadership said at a press conference Monday.

“We’re preparing as if (Francine) was going to hit Houston,” said Darin Carroll, senior vice president at CenterPoint. “We’ve experienced some things with Beryl that we didn’t expect… We don’t want that to happen again, so we’re preparing as if it were going to make landfall in that area.”

CenterPoint is responsible for maintaining the systems that provide power to 2.8 million customers in the greater Houston area. As of Monday evening, CenterPoint had more than 1,300 employees working on vegetation control, more than 1,850 local distribution grid workers were already on site restoring damaged systems, and 1,625 more field workers are expected to be in Houston by the end of the day, according to company officials.

CenterPoint’s efforts appeared to directly address many of the issues that led to widespread power outages after Hurricane Beryl hit the Texas coast on July 8. These include inadequate vegetation control, which can contribute to downed power lines, and a delay in dispatching personnel to restore power before and after the storm.

“The services we provide, both gas and electricity, are in many ways life-sustaining and vital to people. We take that incredibly seriously,” Carroll said. “Our performance during Beryl may not have fully reflected that. In fact, we know it did not. We are ready to show everyone that we have improved.”

Tropical Storm Francine, upgraded from tropical cyclone by the National Weather Service on Monday, is expected to strengthen into a hurricane before making landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday, but forecasters warned that Houston could still see between 1 and 2 inches of rain Tuesday night into Wednesday.

Outage Tracker back online

Centerpoint’s response to Beryl sparked anger among Houston residents and lawmakers alike, who were upset at the company’s apparent failure to adequately prepare its service area for a relatively low-intensity weather event.

“It is clear from the events (Hurricane Beryl) that the quality of (CenterPoint’s) infrastructure, its ability to maintain that infrastructure and its communication with its customers have been called into question,” Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, said in July. The Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulator, launched an investigation into CenterPoint’s handling of Beryl after the storm.

One of the main complaints from CenterPoint customers during the Beryl storm was the lack of the company’s Outage Tracker, a map of the greater Houston area that identifies areas affected by power outages. The tracker went offline during the derecho that devastated Houston in May and was still not restored when Beryl struck in July.

That problem, CenterPoint said, has been resolved. The company encouraged customers to familiarize themselves with a new and improved Outage Tracker, which went online on August 1, before Francine. The Outage Tracker is designed to provide power restoration estimates for the utility’s entire service area within 24 hours of the storm moving out of the Houston area. Details on how to use the new Outage Tracker are available in a demonstration video and “detailed step-by-step instructions” on CenterPoint’s website.

“We disappointed our customers because we didn’t have one during Beryl,” Tony Gardner, senior vice president at CenterPoint, said Monday, calling the experience a “lesson learned.”

Gardner also urged his customers to prepare for the storm by subscribing to the Power Alert Service, which provides community-specific information about power outages, including estimated restoration times, via phone call, text message or email.

At Monday’s press conference, CenterPoint also unveiled a key innovation in its storm preparations that was not present during Beryl: a “damage model” that takes into account variables such as soil conditions, vegetation health and wind speed to predict the storm’s impact.

“We’ve been running this damage model continuously since before Francine,” Carroll said. “It allows us to make earlier decisions about the number of resources we might need and the locations of staging areas… This is just one example of the kind of actions we’re taking to be even more responsive to these events, and of course this is in addition to the investments in resilience that we’ve already made and will continue to make.”

Those investments include a series of actions under CenterPoint’s Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, which the company launched after heavy criticism following Beryl. In a statement Sunday, the company called those efforts its “boldest set of resilience actions” ever.

“As part of the first phase of the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, CenterPoint crews and contractors installed over 1,100 stronger and more resilient fiberglass poles in August, trimmed vegetation along over 2,000 miles of power lines, and installed over 300 automation devices in neighborhoods across Houston,” the company said.

“We heard the call to action after Beryl loud and clear,” Carroll said Monday. “Ultimately, our goal is to become the most stable power grid in the country, and we will achieve that.”

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