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U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia is tired of feeling left in the dark by CenterPoint Energy – both literally and figuratively.
On Wednesday morning, the Congresswoman, whose district wraps around much of the eastern edge of Houston, sent a strongly worded letter to the energy company’s CEO, Jason P. Wells, demanding answers as to why more than a million Houstonians remained without power two days after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the city.
“I write today to inquire about CenterPoint’s preparation for Hurricane Beryl, which left millions of your customers in the Houston region without electricity for now going on day 3,” Garcia wrote. “With scorching temperatures in the area, CenterPoint’s inability to restore power more quickly is creating a public health crisis forcing people to recover from a hurricane while they survive extreme heat.”
In the three-page letter, the Congresswoman poses several questions, including: Why were so many workers deployed the day after the storm ended, and not the same day?; Why was the outage tracking map never brought back online in the nearly two months after the derecho event?; and What is CenterPoint doing to improve reliability? How is this going to be prevented in the future?
“We just want to make sure that CenterPoint knows, in a strong and loud way, that people are unhappy,” Garcia said. “There are 1.3 million people who are still waiting. They need to know: Hey guys, this is Houston. It ain’t our first rodeo. We’ve been through this before. Why do we have to go through this every time we have an event?”
She lamented the fact that CenterPoint seems eager to share news when their quarterly earnings reach more than $1 billion, “but we don’t know what they’re planning to do to make our power go up in a minimum of two days.”
Hurricane Beryl
‘This is frustrating’: Some CenterPoint customers report new outage map has incorrect info
by Miranda Dunlap/ Staff Writer
Logan Anderson, a spokesperson for CenterPoint, declined to comment on the letter Wednesday afternoon. “The company intends to respond to Congresswoman Garcia directly,” Anderson wrote in an email.
“I would consider a Congressional hearing about this at a later date, but I would like to hear a response first and sit and visit with them,” Garcia said Wednesday.
Her goal, she said, is to determine what obstacles are keeping the energy company from better serving her constituents.
“They should have fixed something to make it easier for people, and to bring up the power immediately,” she said. “We’re the fourth largest city and we can’t figure out how to get the electricity back up after a storm? I mean, seriously?”
And, she asked, what will happen next time in an even stronger storm, if the energy giant is not held accountable for putting citizens in the compromising condition of being without power during a heat advisory?
“If we can’t handle the winds and rain we got in that 10 hours, how are you going to prepare for the next one that could be a Category 3, 4 of – dare I say – 5, with real storms and rains for two or three days?” she asked.
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