May occur while working on resiliency Initiative
By David Taylor
Managing Editor
Fed up with CenterPoint, many customers and community leaders have expressed their exasperation with the unfulfilled promises to be better. So was Governor Greg Abbott. In a meeting with the governor, Jason Wells, president and CEO for CenterPoint, promised to build the “most resilient coastal grid anywhere in the country, because that is what the state of Texas and our customers in the Greater Houston area deserve.”
Abbott gave Wells an Aug. 31 deadline to get the job done and meet an accelerated timeline. With it comes more outages, some lasting as much as four to eight hours as crews and contractors begin work on their Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative following substantial damage by Hurricane Beryl.
“While we cannot erase the frustrations and difficulty so many of our customers endured, I, and my entire leadership team, will not make any excuses,” Wells told Abbott in a letter to the governor. “We will improve. We will act with a sense of urgency.”
Lawmakers also wanted to see immediate action when Wells faced the House of Representatives Committee on State Affairs.
“CenterPoint’s lack of preparedness and response to Hurricane Beryl is extremely troubling and raises many questions about their priorities,” said State Rep. Ana Hernandez, vice chair of the committee in a statement to the Star Courier newspaper. “We owe it to our constituents to seek answers, hold CenterPoint accountable, and take meaningful action.”
During a hearing of the Committee on State Affairs in Austin, Wells testified before the committee and answered lawmaker’s questions.
Lon Squyres, city manager for Jacinto City, testified before the committee at the invitation of Hernandez and outlined his disappointments, including poor communication.
“What little bit we got in the way of briefings was literally a daily telephone call, not a Zoom meeting, not a Teams meeting, no videos, no explanations, other than a very crude, archaic phone call,” he said. “We had very little chance for a Q&A or anything else.”
Squyres learned at the meeting that as his crews were out on the streets of Jacinto City collecting and picking up trees, limbs, and debris, he was actually subsidizing CenterPoint Energy.
“Yes, I’m going to get 75 percent of that back from FEMA, but 25 percent of it is coming out of my (city’s) pocket,” he told the committee. “A lot of those trees were left behind in those right of ways, after they were cut off the lines by CenterPoint or some other contractor. So again, I’m subsidizing CenterPoint.”
Squyres also mentioned a serious issue with the nursing home in their city that is home to approximately 160 residents.
“By law, and this is something we really would love to see some legislative help on, they have to have a generator. All that generator must do is run what they deem to be called emergency equipment. Typically, that’s an oxygen concentrator for a few liters of oxygen for older people. They were cooking for 150-200 people out on the front porch to keep from generating heat,” he explained.
“HVAC systems on generators capable of doing their job must be mandatory. The same thing can be said for senior residence buildings. We have an apartment building that houses three stories, 200 units, and upstairs you have people in wheelchairs, on walkers and you can’t get those people down in a power outage. It’s a life safety issue to try and get them all down three flights of stairs,” he said.
Squyres also complained about not being on the list for rapid deployment by CenterPoint for additional generators.
Wells outlined approximately 45 different changes the company would make in an action plan detailed for the governor, many of which were to be completed by an Aug. 31 deadline.
Of the three pillars of the plan, the first was resiliency investments.
“By accelerating adoption of latest construction standards, retrofitting existing assets on an accelerated basis and using predictive modeling and Al and other advanced technologies, we will harden our distribution system and speed restoration. We will also take action to protect our electrical assets by nearly doubling the size of our vegetation management crews and targeting higher risk vegetation to address the number one cause of damage and outages in Hurricane Beryl,” he said.
The second pillar was what he described as a Best-in-Class Customer Communications.
“To ensure our customers have the information they need, when they need it, we will launch a new and more customer-oriented outage tracker (completed on August 1). This online tool will provide better and more complete information during storms and is designed to handle increased demand during such events. We will also hire a chief communications officer as part of our commitment to overhauling our public communications program and approach,” he explained.
Lastly, was strengthened partnerships.
“Effective emergency preparedness and response requires close coordination with government officials. We will hire a seasoned emergency response leader to help the company rapidly accelerate its planning capabilities and to develop close community partnerships to ease the burden of storm events on our more vulnerable communities.”
Hernandez pledged to use the upcoming legislative session to address the issues.
“We will address utility deficiencies in vegetation management, service tracking, and mobile generators, and find solutions that ensure the safety of our communities and provide reliable power for our homes,” she said.
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