HOUSTON — On Thursday, with still more than one million CenterPoint customers without power following Hurricane Beryl, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation into the company.
That’s according to acting Texas Gov. Dan Patrick. Patrick is acting governor while Abbott is overseas on a trade mission.
At the height of the storm, more than 2.2 million CenterPoint customers were out of power. At 3 p.m. Thursday, CenterPoint was down to 1.047M customers still in the dark. On their website, CenterPoint posted that they expect to have 400,000 more customers back online by the end of Friday and another 350,000 by day’s end Sunday.
RELATED: Houston-area power outage tracker
“Folks, that is not acceptable,” Patrick said Thursday at a news conference in Houston. “And I know it's a hard job. I know it's more people than they've ever had without power.”
Patrick said in the news conference that he thinks CenterPoint underestimated the impact Beryl would have on Texas.
“We’re going to investigate it,” Patrick said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it. We are always gonna have big storms in this area. We have lots of trees that hit power lines. That’s going to happen. But we have to be sure that they were as prepared as they should have been before.”
KHOU 11 following the restoration process
CenterPoint said its crews are near completion on damage assessment, with more than 8,500 miles of its circuits walked and thousands of miles flown across the Greater Houston area.
The company said "more specific" estimated restoration times would be available on Thursday.
On Tuesday night, the company released a restoration map the company showed restoration progress, but many frustrated customers reached out to KHOU 11 News saying the map wasn't accurate.
KHOU 11 Investigates reported Monday that unlike in some past hurricanes, CenterPoint did not stage mutual assistance workers in Houston before Beryl made landfall.
On Wednesday, KHOU 11 Investigative Reporter Jeremy Rogalski sat down with the company's vice president of operations to talk about the criticism of their performance.
While Darin Carroll declined to give the company a letter grade on how it has responded to the widespread power outages, he maintained they wouldn't have done anything differently and they're restoring power at a record pace.