P.H. Dexippus said:

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Al Bula said:

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OMFG can we put the lines in the ground already?! This is maddening. Underground lines means less linemen required. Just waterproof them and be done with it.

Do it, CenterPoint. Your shareholders deserve better.

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Sure buddy. You paying for it?

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Yes, sure, fine. We're paying through the nose right now for crews to repair lines again and again after repeated storms. We're paying through the nose for lost productivity. The attitude for some seems to be that if it costs literally anything to prepare for infrequent disaster events then it isn't money well spent.

"It'll cost money" was the same excuse people made for not improving Houston's storm water drainage. Fortunately, better sense prevailed and we slowly but systematically installed storm water sewers across wide stretches of older neighborhoods. That should be the same approach with electrical distribution.

Not yet. Said f it, came to Astros game. Gonna get hammered so I can sleep through the night. 3 hours of sleep in 48 is killing me.

Closing in on 63 hours with no power here. And not a Centerpoint truck in sight.

Thank god for my portable generator we literally just finished setting up on Sunday. Running whole house including AC.

Ferris Wheel Allstar said:

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Not yet. Said f it, came to Astros game. Gonna get hammered so I can sleep through the night. 3 hours of sleep in 48 is killing me.

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Get out of town. Book a hotel. Even it is Waco. There is a Texas Ranger museum there and despite rumors….Waco isn't dry. Most drunk town I have been to…..

The Twin Peaks is off the chain. Highly recommend.

We also don't shoot the CEO of Centerpoint for power loss. But it's harder to just shrug this off when someone else never has these problems. Especially when we kind of think we are better than they are.

Poot said:

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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.

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I wholeheartedly agree here. My argument in these events was to over communicate. The powers that be didn't like that and it seems inherent across the industry.

TXTransplant said:

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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.

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I am in Concan and it was a long day on the River and the beers were flowing so I will address these two:

• The events back to back helped some and hurt others. The folks that were out probably benefited from the new poles/equipment that was installed during the derecho, but conversely others were hurt because they burned through a lot of supplies during that event. Lead times on some of this equipment and even poles is still pretty long. I heard someplace that lead times on poles was something like 3 mos. I am not on the utility side anymore, so this may have changed. Stockpiling poles, pot bank transformers, cross arms, etc does not generate revenue.

• One of my favorite rants while in the business was tree trimming! You must invest in tree trimming and be very aggressive with it. It is expensive and again does not generate revenue. Also, the very person that is looking at a tree that took out their power and hit their roof would love to have had that tree removed about now. Last year, had the utility came in and taken the tree out of their own right of way, would have had a very angry customer on their hands for taking out their "beautiful tree". It can be a double edged sword. I was a huge advocate of vegetation management.