How Houston Made Its Own Outage Map During Hurricane Beryl

Read Time:2 Minute, 36 Second

(TNS) – CenterPoint’s downed power outage tracker map during Hurricane Beryl forced officials at Houston’s Office of Emergency Management to make their own on the fly, inhibiting how fast they were able to deploy resources, OEM director Tom Munoz said Wednesday.

The office historically uses CenterPoint’s outage map as a “crucial” tool to find out which areas of town are without power so city officials can send necessary resources to communities in need with immediacy. But that map went down during May’s derecho, and all emergency management officials had to work with during the hurricane was the energy company’s outage tracker, which only gives a number indicating how many customers are without power and how many had been restored within 24 hours.

“We were in the dark,” OEM spokesperson Brent Taylor told the Chronicle.

CenterPoint initially said it was unable to provide location information on outages to OEM, Taylor said. The energy company eventually provided Houston’s emergency management office zip codes where outages were located.

Emergency management officials then used that data to create their own internal outage map to track who was without power, a feat that took half a day’s time the Tuesday after the storm and took time away from being able to respond to those in need, Taylor said.

Luckily, the office had a person on hand who was experienced in GIS to get the job done, but creating the map was a process Munoz called “time consuming,” “painstaking” and a “resort.”

“It’s definitely very detrimental to the planning, to the response and to the safety of people,” Munoz told officials in a Wednesday update to Houston City Council.

CenterPoint officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the height of outages during Beryl, more than 2.26 million CenterPoint customers were without power and CenterPoint consistently failed to provide timely updates about when power would be restored. Some residents turned to a Whataburger app to keep track of power outages instead.

The same day OEM scrambled to put together its internal outage map, CenterPoint released a live map for residents to track their outage status. Residents voiced concerns about how that CenterPoint map and text updates they were receiving about power restoration weren’t entirely accurate.

OEM’s plan is to go back to using CenterPoint’s outage map once it goes live at the end of August and that the energy company was still a partner they’d continue to work with, Taylor said.

The state’s Public Utility Commission launched an investigation into CenterPoint’s outage response and is supposed to provide feedback to state lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott about legislation that could be passed to prevent future widespread outages.

Senate hearings on the matter will be held in Austin next week.

___