Houston utility says 500K customers still won't have electricity next week as Beryl outages persist

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — About 500,000 customers still won’t have electricity into next week as wide outages from Hurricane Beryl persist and frustration mounts over the pace of restoration, an official with Houston’s biggest power utility said Thursday.

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall on Monday. The company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online in the coming days, but others will wait much longer, he said.

The Category 1 storm knocked out power to around 2.7 million customers after it made landfall in Texas on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.

CenterPoint Energy has struggled to restore power to affected customers, who have grown frustrated that such a relatively weak storm could cause such disruption at the height of summer.