Houston, Texas – Roughly 14,000 Houston-area residents remained without power Tuesday afternoon after overnight thunderstorms moved through the region, from Montgomery County through Houston and into Fort Bend County.
CenterPoint Energy reports 90% of affected customers had their service restored as of 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, with full restoration expected by 10 p.m.
The ongoing outages highlight some persistent challenges in the Humble area, where residents like Patrick Hastings say they’ve experienced frequent service disruptions over the past year.
“I’d say we’ve lost power 20 to 30 times,” said Hastings, who has lived in the Humble area for 15 years. The frequent outages pose a particular challenge for Hastings, who works remotely and risks losing wages when power failures prevent him from doing his job.
Infrastructure concerns persist despite improvement initiative
Hastings points to ongoing maintenance issues, including a downed power pole that has remained unaddressed since Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, and tree limbs growing into power lines near his property.
These problems persist despite CenterPoint’s launch of its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative 10 months ago. Hastings says his repeated calls to the utility company have yielded little action.
“The power lines outside my house already have trees growing around them,” Hastings said. “I’ve called, I’ve said what’s going on, to the point that nothing happens.”
Progress and new reporting tools
Keith Stephens, CenterPoint Energy’s senior vice president and chief communications officer, points to improvements in service reliability this year.
“When we sit here today at the end of May, we normally would have had 20 million more minutes of power outages by this juncture in a normal year,” Stephens said. “We’ve experienced 20 million fewer minutes of outages than we normally would have.”
To address vegetation management concerns, CenterPoint is launching a new feature on its outage tracker that will allow customers to upload photos of problem areas.
“One of our new improvements we are adding to our outage tracker is the ability to upload a picture of your problem and to register it as this needs to be fixed,” Stephens said, adding that the new reporting process will be available “in the weeks ahead.”
