Y'all can flag me or whatever, I just think that sometimes context is important to the situation and can help people rationalize what is going on.

• Communication is very important during an event like this, but utilities always under promise and over deliver where possible. My utility would purposely shut down their outage web site when outages crossed a specific threshold. Standard operating procedure. *** Corporate Communications people have no idea how the business functions, so anything they say is canned and will not commit the utility to anything***
• What you are hearing about damage assessment first is common and part of the recovery plan for all utilities. Unfortunately, to keep bills low, even in 2024 utilities are not as technologically sophisticated as you think they are. The bulk of the damage assessment is done by a human in a truck.
• Public health and safety will always be priorities. Live on the same circuit as a hospital or water pumping station, you hit the lottery.
• Out of town crews are not familiar with your system. They are experts at theirs, but even the differences in distribution Voltages can slow things down. They are usually assigned to grunt work like replacing poles or cutting things in the clear. This frees up the experts to do the technical work required for restoration.
• Out of town crews are usually staged outside of the threat area. The providing utility is not going to place their crews or equipment in danger. The erratic nature of where this thing was going to landfall probably led utilities to keep their crews at home until they were sure where it was going to hit. Imagine being CPS Energy and sending your crews to Corpus to stage when it looked like it was going there and then have to mobilize to Houston.
• Utilities always prioritize getting the largest number of customers back online first. This means that they start at the substation and work their way out from there. The single outages are always the last to be restored.
• Most all utilities cannot afford to have the amount of material required for this type of restoration on hand. Again rates. Imagine the number of poles, transformers, miles of wire, cross arms, nuts, bolts, etc that it takes to do a restoration like this.

This may sound like I am making excuses for the Centerpoint and others. I certainly am not. This is just the reality of what many of you are going through. Sometimes understanding the problem helps you deal with the problem.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I will answer to the best of my ability. 22 years of being on the leadership side of these things has stuffed my brain full of useless information.

My power just came back in Woodlands!!!

Cochran's Crossing back up here!

It turned off. Mothereffer

Dan Scott said:

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It turned off. Mothereffer

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Thanks for the run down… I actually starred your post.

I still think it's a major fail to not keep people informed as accurately as possible. It's not fair to be in the dark as far as how prolonged the situation is going to be.

"Under-promise" would be one thing… but when it's crickets, people can't make remotely educated decisions.

Quote:

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Fact that direcho resulted in 5 days outage is comical enough. That storm was a typical May gully washer in DFW when I was a kid.

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Did you see the ass kicking some parts of town got, especially the Heights and Timbergrove? I've been through multiple hurricanes and a lot of other storms in between, and the May storm was the only time in my life I ever felt the need to seek shelter in my hallway.

Ryan the Temp said:

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Quote:

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Fact that direcho resulted in 5 days outage is comical enough. That storm was a typical May gully washer in DFW when I was a kid.

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Did you see the ass kicking some parts of town got, especially the Heights and Timbergrove? I've been through multiple hurricanes and a lot of other storms in between, and the May storm was the only time in my life I ever felt the need to seek shelter in my hallway.

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Direcho exposed red flags around infrastructure/CP in my opinion. Some real changes need to take place down here to address the grid and get more accountability out of CP and local officials. 5 days of no power for a major city due to a squall line is a joke to me after living through F3 tornados devastating homes a few miles where I hunkered down on several occasions.

Beryl gets a pass, it's a hurricane, a large and widespread wind event. But direcho showed how soft a target Houston is with how things are currently managed…

Fuel stations need to be a priority now. Situation getting tough with no power to pump and everyone running generators

Power on as of 3:34am in 77381 Panther Creek near McCullough Jr High.

Mental frustration is starting to get the better of me.. I just wish CP would give some actual estimates. The no transparency is just ridiculous.

JB!98 said:

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Y'all can flag me or whatever, I just think that sometimes context is important to the situation and can help people rationalize what is going on.

• Communication is very important during an event like this, but utilities always under promise and over deliver where possible. My utility would purposely shut down their outage web site when outages crossed a specific threshold. Standard operating procedure. *** Corporate Communications people have no idea how the business functions, so anything they say is canned and will not commit the utility to anything***
• What you are hearing about damage assessment first is common and part of the recovery plan for all utilities. Unfortunately, to keep bills low, even in 2024 utilities are not as technologically sophisticated as you think they are. The bulk of the damage assessment is done by a human in a truck.
• Public health and safety will always be priorities. Live on the same circuit as a hospital or water pumping station, you hit the lottery.
• Out of town crews are not familiar with your system. They are experts at theirs, but even the differences in distribution Voltages can slow things down. They are usually assigned to grunt work like replacing poles or cutting things in the clear. This frees up the experts to do the technical work required for restoration.
• Out of town crews are usually staged outside of the threat area. The providing utility is not going to place their crews or equipment in danger. The erratic nature of where this thing was going to landfall probably led utilities to keep their crews at home until they were sure where it was going to hit. Imagine being CPS Energy and sending your crews to Corpus to stage when it looked like it was going there and then have to mobilize to Houston.
• Utilities always prioritize getting the largest number of customers back online first. This means that they start at the substation and work their way out from there. The single outages are always the last to be restored.
• Most all utilities cannot afford to have the amount of material required for this type of restoration on hand. Again rates. Imagine the number of poles, transformers, miles of wire, cross arms, nuts, bolts, etc that it takes to do a restoration like this.

This may sound like I am making excuses for the Centerpoint and others. I certainly am not. This is just the reality of what many of you are going through. Sometimes understanding the problem helps you deal with the problem.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I will answer to the best of my ability. 22 years of being on the leadership side of these things has stuffed my brain full of useless information.

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Thanks for the info. What you said about staging makes sense and aligned with what my friend from Alabama Power told me about their crews coming to help. They didn't send them over until they knew where the damage is (and it takes them and their equipment two days to get here).

If you are able to answer, I would like follow up information related to the equipment issues. This is the FOURTH major weather event in Houston that has taken out power for at least two days (often longer) in the last three years. Three of these events have just been in the last year (going back to last June).

You say they can't afford to keep parts and things on hand, but with the frequency that these things are occurring, don't they have an obligation to figure that out?

Also, for less widespread events, when they repair old, unreliable equipment, don't they have an obligation to repair/replace other equipment in areas that maybe didn't have an outage in the last storm but are more susceptible to it because the equipment is old? I ask this because it seems like some areas that get major repairs don't have as severe an outage (or even one at all) when the next weather event hits.

Same question about preventative tree/brush clearing and maintenance. It seems like, at least in my area, after the storm last June that knocked power out, they literally just removed the trees and limbs that had fallen on the lines and were causing the outage. At what point do they have to look and say there are more trees that pose a significant threat and need to be removed proactively? I know my area/neighborhood is very overgrown - despite the fact we've had multiple major weather events that you would think might have cleared things out a bit.

I just don't see how having these multi-day outages multiple times every year is sustainable. The lost revenue, time, and productivity due to businesses being closed has got to be extensive. I'm thinking some small businesses who were just out from the May storm and are out again now might end up closing - particularly restaurants who lost business and had to throw out all their inventory.

Even just for the average family - throwing out the entire contents of your fridge (and maybe freezer) three times in one year is not a trivial expense. Not to mention the salary losses of hourly workers who literally cannot work because their place of employment is closed.

It really is awful that Centerpoint is pushing the cost of their failures onto people and businesses in the community.

If this were a once every few years event, it wouldn't be so bad. But it's happening with way more frequency than that, and lesser strength storms seem to be causing more severe and widespread damage that what's happened in the past.

atmtws said:

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Centerpoint (unexpectedly) just went live with a new outage map.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420

Legend for those using cell, seems like it only shows on the desktop version:

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I know for a fact that people that show as having power don't have power on that map

Early bird gets the gas for his generator

Heights Valero on Studewood

Centerpoint keeping people in the dark - both literally and figuratively - has been their MO for the last few years. The outage tracker hasn't worked properly since at least last June (if it ever did - that's arguable), and that's also the time that I noticed they stopped providing estimates/updates about when power would be restored. Those actually used to be kind of decent, but we stopped getting them.

Things were so bad in my area, I wrote a letter outlining all of this to the TPUC. Do you know what they did with it? Sent the letter to Centerpoint and let them reply. What I got in response was a list of excuses and outright lies about the extent of the outages in my area (we had a multi hour outage one perfectly clear weekend that CP denied ever happened).

I'm glad to see them getting called out, but it's frustrating that it's had to take so long when this has been going on for quite some time.