HOUSTON – CenterPoint Energy says 100 percent of its response crews are now in place as a winter storm approaches the Houston area.
Chief Communications Officer for CenterPoint Energy Keith Stephens says the crews are ready to support restoration efforts for the 2.9 million businesses and homes across the Greater Houston area.
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“We’ve assembled literally an army,” he said.
Nathan Brownell, Vice President of Resiliency, says a total of 3,300 workers and 1,500 trucks from nine different states have been brought in to help with restoration efforts. They are now all in their assigned positions waiting to respond.Brownell said with any outages, hospitals will be the priority, but after that they will go from outages with the most customers out to those with the least.“We are projecting that there may be between 100,000 and 200,000 outages over the next couple of days,” Stephens said. “Those outages would never be at one time and to put it into perspective, we have 2.9 million customers, we would have 100-200,000 customers affected and restored over the next couple of days.”Lena Dziechowski, lead meteorologist for CenterPoint, says the forecast has actually trended a bit more positively in regards to concern for power outages because it appears some sleet could mix in. While sleet is a problem for roads, it is better for power lines and power infrastructure than freezing rain.“It doesn’t stick to power lines, it doesn’t stick to tree limbs, its something that you can move out of the way,” she said.She said for most of the area, we are not expecting ice accumulations to be enough to cause significant power issues, although a few isolated areas to the north of Houston could experience that.“The front has moved in a little bit faster than anticipated and so the cold is in place a little bit quicker and that is more of a profile that would lend to sleet coming down vs. freezing rain,” she said.