CenterPoint Energy Crews Respond to Holiday Storms and Texas Tornado

CenterPoint Energy line crews restored power to about 50,000 customers whose power was knocked out by severe thunderstorms overnight Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Then on Dec. 29, a tornado impacted central and southern parts of Galveston County, including Santa Fe, Bacliff, and Port Bolivar.

As part of the restoration efforts in the Greater Houston area, the crews replaced or straightened more than 40 poles, replaced four transformers and replaced or picked up almost six miles of wire. Following the tornado in Galveston, lineworkers had to replace numerous poles and equipment and rehang conductors due to significant damage. Additional field resources were brought in to focus on these remaining areas as well as on localized outages. They kept working until the lights were back on for everyone who could receive service.

After that storm event, the company's emergency response and operations personnel continued to actively monitor potentially severe weather projected to impact parts of the Greater Houston area on New Year's Eve.

“For the second time in three days, we are tracking the potential for severe weather that could impact the Greater Houston area this holiday season," said Matt Lanza, CenterPoint's meteorology manager on Dec. 31. "We're continuing to keep a close watch on the potential for thunderstorms, high winds and even lightning that could cause some targeted outages. We will continue to remain on alert for our customers and communities and will coordinate with our operations and customer teams to bring to bear the resources and response needed for any homes or businesses that may be impacted."

The company continued to keep crews mobilized and resources deployed across its system and was prepared to respond to impacts to the approaching weather system. CenterPoint had a plan in place to quickly dispatch additional crews to assist with restoration efforts, if necessary.

CenterPoint's recently enhanced Emergency Response and Preparedness team continues to lead the company's preparedness efforts and coordination with public agencies and partners. The team provides regular updates to relevant agencies and city officials to communicate the company's pre-storm activities and readiness posture and provide critical updates.

CenterPoint Preparedness Actions
The company took these steps the company to prepare and respond to the holiday storms:

Executed its enhanced staffing plan: The company used predictive analysis based on similar storm events to enhance the staffing plan for readiness in the event of system impacts.
Activating additional frontline electric crews: Readied additional local full-time and contract frontline workers to help with the storm response across the Greater Houston region.
Pre-staging additional material and equipment: The operations team prepared additional inventory for deployment in the event of damage to poles and other equipment.
Sharing customer communications: Shared safety and preparedness actions with CenterPoint customers across social media and other platforms to help keep customers informed and prepared.
Preparing to conduct patrols and assess damage: Once storms exited the area and it was safe to do so, CenterPoint crews were deployed across its service territory to assess damage.

Outage Tracker
During the recent holiday storms, customers could stay up-to-date on outages with CenterPoint's new and improved Outage Tracker. Since Hurricane Beryl earlier this year, CenterPoint has made the following upgrades to its online outage tracker, which is also available in a Spanish-language version:

Improved reliability: The Outage Tracker uses cloud-based technology, allowing it to be scalable for growth and accessible during periods of high demand.  
Timely, consistent updates: The data in Outage Tracker is updated every five minutes to provide the most up-to-date details on outages.
Weather information: The Outage Tracker features weather conditions. The weather function can be used to better understand how weather may be impacting the system and affecting outages.   
Mobile friendly: Displays the information in an easy-to-read format on a phone or tablet.   
Summary reporting: Users can view a summary of outages by county, city and zip code to better understand regional impact.  
Estimated restoration feature: The estimated restoration feature in the outage description pop-up box provides the estimated time of restoration (ETR) for the impacted outage area.   
Satellite view: The option to switch from a default “street view" to a “satellite view" is available in the layers section of the left side bar. This option can help users better understand the vegetation density in their areas that may affect outages.