When Hurricane Beryl made direct contact with Houston as a category one storm on Monday morning, more than 2.2 million residents were left without electricity. Days after the storm, CenterPoint Energy, the utility monopoly responsible for delivering that electricity, remains under fire from Houstonians who’ve been frustrated with the company’s response time and lack of communication. CenterPoint’s own public communications have stayed relentlessly positive, however, providing details of the customers they’ve restored power to by this point—roughly 60 percent of them at press time—and touting the company’s charitable giving to local organizations in affected areas.
None of those things, of course, give the 860,000 Houstonians without power access to, say, an outage tracker built for the mobile devices that they rely on for information, or updates on when they can expect power to be restored. At a city council meeting on Wednesday, CenterPoint vice president of regulatory policy, Brad Tutunjian, took questions from frustrated officials about the company’s efforts. On Friday morning, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick posted a list of questions he has for CenterPoint officials on social media. Shortly after, Tutunjian spoke with Texas Monthly about the company’s response, which he defended, and its strategy for providing Houstonians with clear, accurate, and up-to-date information.
Texas Monthly: At the Houston City Council meeting, you said that you were fully prepared for the storm, but also indicated that you were caught off guard. And I wanted to make sure that I understood how both of those things could be true.
Brad Tutunjian: So I never said that we were caught off guard. I was saying, we’re doing everything based on the information that we had. And all signs from the weather forecast was that it was not going to be [in Houston]. So when we’re looking at Thursday and Friday, the reports were telling us it was going to come to parts of Mexico, possibly South Texas. And as it creeps up, within seventy-two hours, it looked like it was going to impact, possibly, potentially the western part of our territory. So we are fully prepared. The point that I was making is, despite the information they were telling us, we went ahead and executed our EOP [Emergency Operations Procedure] plan. Early in the weekend, because of the information we had, we acquired about three thousand field resources [including out of state workers] and as the storm started turning this way, we went out and secured a few more because it looked like we were going to have more of an impact than what we expected. That’s when we were able to get the ten thousand field resources ready for the storm. I think we were fully prepared, and the results that you see from the restoration effort, I think, is a demonstration of how we’re able to get customers on so quickly, specifically because of that preparation.
Texas Monthly: We’re at the start of what looks to be a particularly active hurricane season. If another storm comes to Houston, should customers expect that the response to Beryl is what they’ll get in response to the next one as well, if this is the fully prepared version of CenterPoint?
Brad Tutunjian: When you have a direct impact from a hurricane such as this, and you have to rebuild your infrastructure—that takes time. And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to go out and fully assess the facilities that we have, and it’s typically done within two days. And then on top of that, your resources have to go out and rebuild that infrastructure. And so it’s common that, when you have a direct hit with a hurricane, it is going to take days, it could take weeks, to restore. When I was a storm rider and first responder for Hurricane Rita, that was thirty-two days without power. Hurricane Ike was eighteen days. When we talk about resiliency, how do we take the thirty-two days from Hurricane Rita down to maybe twenty, then can we make it fifteen? That’s the goal—you’re never going to be able to completely keep all of our facilities up to withstand a full frontal attack from a hurricane. It’s a matter of, how do you improve and help the efficiency of the restoration process?
Texas Monthly: People understand that hurricanes are going to take out the power. A lot of the frustration that I’ve heard is from people who feel like, in addition to not having power, they haven’t had clear and informative communication. What do you say to the customers who are frustrated with that?
Brad Tutunjian: I definitely recognize the challenges that they’re having without power. We know that a lot of our customers have medicines that they keep in the fridge. They’re worried about being able to stay cool when we’re having a heat advisory. We certainly recognize our part in not being as communicative as we should have been, but that has not had a role or an impact on our restoration efforts. I apologize that we were not as proactive before the storm. Knowing if the storm was going to be a tropical storm or a hurricane was a challenge, because these storms are unpredictable. You know, all the signs were telling us that it was not going to be a hurricane, that it was not going in this direction. I do feel like we should have done a better job of defining how we were proactive in the preparation piece we were involved with, and discussing with our emergency management operations folks with the counties about the preparations that we’ve done for this event. We could have done a better job informing the public.
Texas Monthly: It’s been five days, and there’s now an outage map, but it’s hard for customers to know what to do with the information that it provides. It might say ’assessment complete’ or ‘assessment in progress.’ But if you’re a customer, that doesn’t mean anything to you. What do you say to people who feel, even at this point in the process, that the communication is still not sufficient for them to figure out what they’re supposed to do?
Brad Tutunjian: I fully understand. We had an outage tracker map that we have been utilizing for quite a long time during the derecho. We had system issues with that particular outage tracker. We had commercial entities, people setting up bots, overwhelming the system and causing it to crash. We were hopeful that we could rehabilitate that system. Unfortunately, we were not successful. We determined after the derecho that our outage tracker system was not salvageable. So we worked to design a tracker that will be able to work for these types of events. We started doing this prior to the hurricane, and our hope was that we would have it up and running prior to hurricane season come August or September. It’s just really unfortunate the timing of this hurricane. We haven’t seen anything at this level of magnitude this early in the season.
But we understand the frustration. We’re doing everything that we can to get out that information as quickly as possible. Some of that information has to be gathered from people in the field, literally walking down the circuits and assessing pole by pole, foot of wire by foot of wire, exactly what the extent of that damage is for us to get that information. And as soon as we can get it, we have people around the clock sitting at the computers trying to enter that [information] and get it out as quickly as we can.
Texas Monthly: I’m sure you saw that people were using the Whataburger store locator app to get a broad sense of what parts of the city had power, because they couldn’t get that from CenterPoint. Is the struggle to get information unique to Beryl, or is that something customers should prepare for the next time a storm comes through?
Brad Tutunjian: We have not had this issue in the past, and we don’t anticipate having it in the future once we get our new outage tracker system up and running. It’s just unfortunate with the timing of where we are that we don’t have the automated system that allows us to do that, and so we have to do it physically by hand.
Texas Monthly: Is that automated system coming?
Brad Tutunjian: Yes. That is the new outage tracker that we’ve already started to build prior to Hurricane Beryl.
Texas Monthly: Do you know when that will be ready?
Brad Tutunjian: Our intent was to have it out before the end of July.
Texas Monthly: Has Beryl impacted the development of that tracker?
Brad Tutunjian: No, that’s completely independent of this.
Texas Monthly: Will that map be designed for mobile?
Brad Tutunjian: Absolutely. This is going to be a brand new platform, a brand new technology that we’re trying to leverage all of those specific issues.
Texas Monthly: The press release you sent out last night says that power should be restored to eighty percent of affected customers by the end of the day on Sunday. Another way of putting that is that you expect nearly half a million customers to be without power for more than a full week. How do you respond to the frustration people feel when they hear CenterPoint talking about all of the good work they’re doing?
Brad Tutunjian: Well, I’d like to acknowledge the frustrations. We certainly are frustrated as well. Our linemen are in the field working sixteen hour shifts in that same heat that they are. They want to be home with their family. They want to be able to get back to their quality of life. But those are the committed individuals that are doing everything they can. I think a lot of that frustration stems from not being up front before the storm, on the public side, about what the expectations are and the preparations that we’ve made. With hindsight being 20/20, if we had full confirmation up front that this was coming directly at us, I believe we would have been more active. I think that would have helped people prepare and recognize that this is a type of storm that takes weeks to rebuild, and I think that would have helped manage the expectations.
Texas Monthly: Can you tell me about the decision to frame everything as a positive, when you don’t know how long it’s going to take for half a million people to get the lights turned back on?
Brad Tutunjian: I guess our hope is that when you look at the progress that we’re making, it’s reflective of how quickly we’re getting the storm-impacted customers turned back on. I realize that everybody’s frustrated that’s out there in the heat, but what we’re seeing with the numbers here is that we’re having an industry-leading response. For example, during Hurricane Nicholas, there were 700,000 customers without power. That took five days to get substantially complete. We had 750,000 customers restored in 24 hours during this storm. With the devastation, the impact, the 2.26 million customers, it’s going to take time. When we say weeks, we’re looking at in general, that’s what the response is for any type of hurricane. We’re committed to trying to reduce that with building and strengthening and hardening our grid, our distribution infrastructure. You can never fully stop the tree or the debris from impacting our facilities. We’ve got to start looking at how we can make it more resilient so that we can pick back up and get everybody back on sooner.
Texas Monthly: That makes sense. But if you don’t have power now and it’s been five days, and you know that there’s a chance that you’re in the half million people who aren’t going to have power by the end of the day on Sunday, what should you expect?
Brad Tutunjian: On the outage map that we have currently, we’re analyzing the numbers with resources by hand, and we’re putting the estimated time of restoration on those maps. We had our last press release that came out yesterday that we were going to start doing that by noon yesterday. So that information is going out. It’s not a shotgun approach where we’re able to get every single county zip code up at one time. So we are still in the process of updating that, and we’re trying to do that as quickly as we can. Some areas have that information, while others are still being worked on.
Texas Monthly: When will that information be available for every customer?
Brad Tutunjian: We ask everybody to check that map. We’re updating it in real time. So more and more information is updated by the hour. We could actually start seeing power restored today and tomorrow. What the tracker says is an estimate for when we’ll be substantially complete within that particular area that we’ve identified. With that being said, even when some of that power is restored, for example, we might have some independent transformer issues for some customers. They could have some damage to their weather head. So we want to make sure that people understand that when we say that we do have power in your area, there are individuals who still might not have power and that we are going to work to try to get that restored as well.
Texas Monthly: There have been posts on social media from people who are saying that they’re out of state linemen who’ve been brought in to Houston to work on this, and that CenterPoint has been negotiating pay and asking them to front the costs for their own food and hotels, and claiming that their work was being delayed for those reasons. Have you seen those posts?
Brad Tutunjian: Yeah, I have, and that’s frustrating, unfortunately, to see that. But I can assure you that’s not our work. We’ve participated in these mutual aid associations for decades now. When it comes to us requesting the resources, there is a database with everyone that participates in that association, and prior to hurricane season, every utility, municipality, and contractor goes in and enters the resources that they have available to send. If there were an event like this, each company has their unique situation regarding what their costs are and what their jobs are, and you can look at the rate that they use to recover their costs in their place. All of that is provided to us by the company, and we put ours on there. We say, “Hey, we are CenterPoint Energy. Here’s the list of resources we have. Here’s the cost or the price of that,” and so that simplifies it to the point where when we need resources, all that stuff is approved and ready to go. All we have to do is make a call, we see who raises their hand and put those resources online. There is no negotiating. All of that stuff is predetermined prior to the storm.
Texas Monthly: When we see stuff like that going around social media, is it fabricated?
Brad Tutunjian: It’s completely fabricated.
Texas Monthly: What lessons or infrastructure changes are you taking from Beryl so that people can feel confident that what’s happening now isn’t what’s going to happen next time?
Brad Tutunjian: I think the main lesson learned is being communicative on the up-front regarding the preparation plan that we have. I’m actually very proud of and impressed by the accomplishments that we’ve made on this restoration effort. I’ve been doing restoration work for 26 years now at CenterPoint Energy. I’ve worked in the Houston region, Southeast Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and responded to hurricanes all throughout those areas. I’ve never seen a response as swift in my 26 years experience. However, what I can tell you is that we have not had the confidence of the general public in all the work that we’ve done, and we take ownership of that. We could have done a better job to communicate that information upfront.
