Houston’s Post-Hurricane Woes Cast New Light On Eversource Investment Cuts
At the end of the Independence Day weekend, Hurricane Beryl slammed the southeastern coast of Texas as a Category 1 storm. While storms of these size are not uncommon in the Gulf Coast, a week later, the residents of Houston and other surrounding cities and towns are still digging out of the rubble, with power out for more than 1 million residents as many as five days after the storm made landfall. All that while the city now faces a severe heat wave, with temperatures and humidity soaring to make it feel triple digits outside.
Reports out of the Houston area indicate that there have been significant struggles in restoring power, with anecdotal reports showing mismanagement by Houston’s primary electric provider, CenterPoint, amid a storm the region should have been able to withstand, according to Space City Weather. It’s a story Connecticut residents know all too well, with similar failures in storm response and recovery compared to the severity of a storm itself seen in 2020, with Tropical Storm Isaias, and 2011, when Hurricane Irene in late August and a surprise snowstorm around Halloween knocked out power for weeks in some areas.
CenterPoint isn’t the only organization that is receiving blame in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. As one example, Texas Governor Greg Abbott waited five days after the storm made landfall to request aid through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, contrary to common practice. But with millions of people struggling under high heat with little to no relief in the United States’ fourth-largest city, the electricity provider is receiving strong criticism for its actions, or lack of them.
CenterPoint itself pointed to issues with contractors; the company’s CEO told the Chronicle that worker training and confusion, as well as cataloging damage caused by the storm, led to delays in work being completed. Immediately after the storm, more than 2 million customers were without power, but about 1 million received power back in about two days, he said, thanks to the company’s resiliency plan helping prevent further damage. The company’s CEO said it invests $2 billion a year into resiliency.
According to the Houston Chronicle, however, a number of Houston residents told the outlet they reported questionable trees around the city to the power company that needed trimming. The company says it trims about 1 million trees per year in the city to protect against such issues, but customers said no work was done on trees for several years even after these reports, making circumstances worse when those trees broke and collapsed. While CenterPoint performs work on about 1 million trees per year, there are about 33 million in the Houston area – and the company itself cited weak trees as part of the damage causing such issues.
Eversource also performs frequent work to trim trees around Connecticut for similar reasons, but recent news in light of Houston’s struggles raises concerns. In May, Eversource announced it would cut spending on reliability efforts about $500 million through 2028, which represents about $100 million of preparation work each year, and tree trimming is among Eversource’s preparation efforts. The announcement came shortly after the company ended its investment for a $50 million program supporting electric vehicle purchases.
Without this support, a future storm impacting Connecticut – at a time when experts say more hurricanes and tropical storms are expected to hit the East Coast – could cause serious, lingering damage. A worst-case scenario as the result of this decision to pull funding could resemble the scene in Houston now – or the issues seen after Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020.
Posted by Joe O’Leary
