CenterPoint Energy teams monitoring for potential severe weather threat for Greater Houston area

CenterPoint Energy teams monitoring for potential severe weather threat for Greater Houston area

Monday-December-23-2024

​​Houston - Dec. 23, 2024 - Even as the December holidays arrive, CenterPoint Energy continues to actively monitor potentially severe weather projected to impact the Greater Houston area tomorrow/Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. The company has been monitoring the changing weather over the weekend and is mobilizing resources and coordinating with relevant local agency partners to be prepared to respond to impacts to this weather system. In addition to crews scheduled to work through the holiday, the company has a plan in place to dispatch additional crews to assist with restoration efforts, if necessary.​

CenterPoint's recently enhanced Emergency Response and Preparedness team, led by Senior Vice President Don Daigler, is leading the company's preparedness efforts and coordination with public agencies and partners. The team continues to provide regular updates to federal, state, county and city officials to communicate the company's pre-storm activities and readiness posture and provide critical updates.

"We're continuing to monitor the line of storms and threat of severe weather expected in the Greater Houston area overnight on Christmas Eve. We're keeping a particularly close watch on the potential for outages that could result from forecasted high wind gusts and lightning. With our entire Houston electric territory in the area of just marginal severe weather risk, we don't anticipate widespread damage and related outages at this time, but we are coordinating our resources and response for all outcomes," said Matt Lanza, CenterPoint's Meteorology Manager and member of CenterPoint's Emergency Preparedness and Response team.

CenterPoint Preparedness Actions

Steps the company is taking to prepare and respond to the potential holiday severe weather include:

• Executed its enhanced holiday staffing plan: In addition to crews working through the holiday, the company utilized predictive analysis based on similar storm events to enhance staffing plan for readiness in the event of system impacts.
• Activating additional frontline electric crews: Readied additional local full-time and contract frontline workers to help with the storm response across the Greater Houston region.
• Pre-staging additional material and equipment: Operations team has prepared additional inventory for deployment in the event of damage to poles and other equipment.
• Sharing customer communications: Sharing safety and preparedness actions with CenterPoint customers across social media and other platforms to help keep customers informed and prepared.
• Preparing to conduct patrols and assess damage: Once storms exit the area and it's safe to do so, CenterPoint crews will be deployed across its service territory to assess damage.
  
  

"We know how important it is for homes and businesses to have the power they expect and deserve this holiday season. That is why we are preparing now to respond to any potential impacts to our system so we can safely and quickly restore service to our customers. While it's our practice year-round, to respond quickly to any outages, we are even more focused to make sure that potential impacts are restored this Christmas and Hannukah holiday," said Deryl Tumlinson, CenterPoint's Vice President of Distribution Operations and Service Delivery. "Even as we continue to coordinate with our emergency partners and take steps to prepare, we strongly urge our customers to remain weather aware and have an outage plan in place."

Outage Tracker

Customers can also stay up-to-date on outages with CenterPoint's new and improved Outage Tracker. Since Hurricane Beryl earlier this year, CenterPoint has made the following upgrades to its online outage tracker:

• Improved reliability: The Outage Tracker uses cloud-based technology, allowing it to be scalable for growth and accessible during periods of high demand.
• Timely, consistent updates: The data in Outage Tracker is updated every 5 minutes to provide the most up-to-date details on outages.
• Weather information: The Outage Tracker features weather conditions. The weather function can be used to better understand how weather may be impacting the system and affecting outages.
• Mobile friendly: Displays the information in an easy-to-read format on a phone or tablet.
• Summary reporting: Users can view a summary of outages by county, city and zip code to better understand regional impact.
• Estimated restoration feature: The estimated restoration feature in the outage description pop-up box provides the estimated time of restoration (ETR) for the impacted outage area.
• Satellite view: The option to switch from a default "street view" to a "satellite view" is available in the layers section of the left side bar. This option can help users better understand the vegetation density in their areas that may affect outages.
  
  

In addition, CenterPoint has recently released a Spanish-language version of the Outage Tracker.

Power Alert Service®

CenterPoint electric customers are encouraged to enroll in the company's Power Alert Service® to receive outage details, estimated restoration times and customer-specific restoration updates via phone call, text or email.

CenterPoint encourages all customers to have a plan to stay safe

CenterPoint is encouraging all of its customers to prepare and have a plan to stay safe. Customers can get storm-related electric, natural gas and flooding safety tips at CenterPointEnergy.com/StormCenter.

For the latest updates, follow CenterPoint on X (formerly Twitter) for real-time updates.

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