CenterPoint releases Hurricane Beryl power outage map

CenterPoint Energy, the city’s primary electricity provider, released an interactive map Tuesday evening that provides some insight into Hurricane Beryl’s impact on Houston.

The map’s debut comes weeks ahead of its long-awaited deadline — CenterPoint spokesman Paul Lock said Tuesday that the map will be completed “in the next few weeks” and likely won’t be helpful in tracking Beryl’s restoration efforts.

You can access the Outage Tracker here.

The utility company hasn’t had an Outage Tracker map since it was wiped clean during May’s deadly derecho, which left more than a million customers without power. Officials said too many visitors to their site in May “overwhelmed” the map, causing “technical difficulties,” such as some areas incorrectly showing power when they didn’t.

CenterPoint is responsible for the systems that deliver power to nearly 2.8 million Houston-area customers. When deadly Hurricane Beryl ripped through the Houston area Monday morning, it knocked out power to nearly 80 percent of their customer base, or 2.2 million customers.

The lack of neighborhood-level data was a source of frustration for many CenterPoint customers, both in May and after Hurricane Beryl, as residents wanted answers about which areas were most impacted by the hurricane and when power would be restored.

The lack of an official outage map after Beryl has left frustrated Houstonians turning to the app Whataburger as a proxy for power outages across the region. The social media user went viral after drawing attention to their interactive map showing which locations around the city were closed after the storm, and his creative solution has garnered national attention.

The Whataburger app is used to track power outages, which is useful since the electricity provider doesn’t show a map.
Still nearly 1.9 million power outages. photo: twitter.com/d8srWmw1oV
— BBQ Bryan (@BBQBryan) July 9, 2024

The official map CenterPoint released Tuesday divides service areas into three categories: areas with power, areas designated for repair and areas the company is still evaluating. It also shows how many customers lost power in each ZIP code.

The map does not indicate when residents should expect power to be restored, but officials said the new tool will offer “the same level of outage information and functionality” as the previous map.

This feature may be available in the coming days.

“As CenterPoint completes its damage assessment in the coming days, it will provide more detailed information on its estimated time to recovery,” the company said in a statement.

As of 8 p.m. Tuesday, CenterPoint said in a statement that it had restored power to 850,000 customers, although its website shows only 675,000 customers had power restored. It expects that number to reach 1 million by the end of Wednesday, but did not provide an estimate for the remaining residents and businesses.

“It’s going to take a few days,” Lock said. “I can’t give you a timeline, but it won’t be tomorrow.”

Related