They Just Won't Guarantee Which Sunday.....

CenterPoint: Most customers will have power by Sunday

09:25 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2008
By KATHERINE SATHER / KHOU.com Staff

HOUSTON – CenterPoint Energy officials today said most customers would have their power restored by Sunday.

The company has restored power to 75 percent of its customer base. With 1.58 million customers restored, only 600,000 remained without power. Most of these are people living in eastern areas of service.

Officials said they underestimated the outages Ike would cause. They predicted about 1 million people would lose power, but Ike more than doubled those figures. As a result the company says it did not have enough manpower originally to make the mass repairs.

Yet CEO David McClanahan said restoration efforts were going well.

“We’ve restored power to over 1.5 million customers in nine days,” McClanahan said at an afternoon press conference. “I think that’s quite an accomplishment.”

He estimated the cost of restoration would be $350 million to $500 million.

“What we do is we recover these costs after the fact,” McClanahan said. “And we recover it over let’s say 14 or 15 years. Based on that kind of recovery period this will be between $1 and $2 per month on our customer.”

“Obviously we don’t like to see any increase, but it’s not a huge impact,” he said.

Company spokesperson Tom Standish said this is “very much a tree outage,” caused by falling trees becoming entangled in power lines.

Officials confirm that in 2006 the company realized it should trim more trees in the area, but chose not to spend the money.

Standish said thousands of crew members are working to clear downed trees and restore power.

“By this coming Sunday all of the major infrastructure work … will be done,” Standish said. “For the most part all of the people in this area will have their power restored. Now that’s not everybody.”

Standish said if you notice everyone else’s lights are on but yours, call CenterPoint.

“Let us know,” Standish said. “We are going to be going door-to-door.”

McClanahan said he realizes some people would like recovery efforts to progress faster.

“About this time last week after our initial assessment of the damage, we said by today we were going to have 50 to 75 percent of our service restored,” he said. “Well in fact we have achieved the high end of that estimate and so we feel good about that.”

As of Thursday evening,Texas New Mexico Power has restored 83 percent of its customers back, while Sam Houston had restored power to 95 percent.