CenterPoint Energy continues to make significant progress restoring power in the Greater Houston area and surrounding communities following Hurricane Nicholas' impact earlier this week.
"We have made excellent progress so far safely restoring service to our customers who were impacted by Hurricane Nicholas, and our crews continue to work diligently and around-the-clock to address all remaining outages as safely and quickly as possible," said Kenny Mercado, executive vice president, Electric Utility, CenterPoint Energy. "We appreciate our customers' continued patience and understanding as we work to address the more challenging outage issues caused by the storm's extensive damage to some parts of our system."
The company has restored service to more than 380,000 electric customers, down from a peak outage count of 460,000 at 8 a.m. CT on Sept. 14. At this time, CenterPoint Energy is down to less than 80,000 customers without power.
CenterPoint Energy electric system assessments will be completed today, and the company expects its customer outage numbers to continue to decline. CenterPoint Energy said that it expects to have the majority of the remaining customer outages restored by the end of the day. Isolated outages should be addressed by the end of this week.
In addition, mutual assistance crews will be assisting with the restoration process today.
The company noted that Hurricane Nicholas may have caused damage to customer-owned equipment, such as their meter box or weatherhead – the point where the line enters the home through a pipe. In those cases, customers will need to contact a qualified electrician to make sure the damage is repaired before the company is able to restore service to them.
The company's natural gas system is performing well and we are continuing to address natural gas issues found during our system assessments," said Scott Doyle, Executive Vice President, Natural Gas. "Our natural gas crews will transition to assist with power restoration efforts as needed."
