More than 1 million utility customers remained without power in the Houston region Thursday, more than three days after Hurricane Beryl uprooted trees and knocked down power lines. And for most of them, those outages are expected to last days longer.
About 2.3 million of CenterPoint Energy’s 2.6 million customers in the Houston area lost electricity during the storm, and the utility said it had restored more than 1.1 million of those outages by Wednesday night.
It said it expects to restore power to another 750,000 customers by the end of the weekend — leaving nearly 400,000 customers for whom power is unlikely to be restored within a week of Beryl’s landfall early Monday.
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The slow pace of power grid recovery underscores how, despite being a relatively low-end hurricane, Beryl unleashed major damage on a landscape that was already saturated and trees already weakened by other recent storms. Along the coast, parts of the electric system will need to be rebuilt entirely, and damage was also significant in dense parts of Houston, CenterPoint officials said.
Entergy, which serves customers in parts of eastern Texas, was meanwhile reporting 108,000 outages Thursday morning, mostly in Montgomery County just north of Houston. The utility said that it expected to restore all but about 15,000 of those by Friday evening but that for some areas, power might not turn back on until Saturday or Sunday.
About 1.3 million utility customers were without power across all of Texas as of Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.
