Powerless: More than 99 percent of region in the dark
Daybreak today in Hurricane Ike's wake only revealed what Houston area power providers already knew — the lights are out for roughly 5 million people, and getting the juice flowing again will be a painstaking process that could take weeks.
Virtually all electricity customers of both CenterPoint Energy and Entergy Texas are without power today at noon. The Texas-New Mexico Power Co., which services communities south of town, from Alvin to West Columbia, is 100 percent offline.
"We sustained a massive hit," said CenterPoint Energy spokesman Floyd LeBlanc, noting that 2.1 million customers out of 2.26 million are without power.
A CenterPoint customer is not neccessarily one person. For example, one family househould frequently has more.
"We're realizing there's a lot of property damage. Trees hit power lines, some fell on houses, buildings and cars. This storm did a lot of damage," he said.
Service trucks have already started to roll into neighborhoods across Houston now that winds have finally subsided and damage assessors are walking the power lines to check for breaks, according to CenterPoint spokesman Floyd LeBlanc.
But, so far, CenterPoint has not been giving permission to fly its helicopters over the area to assess damage.
"The Federal Aviation Administration said immediately after the hurricane only medical transport would be allowed in the area but we are pressing them. We would like to get up and take advantage of this daylight," he said.
Despite the lack of aerial videos and photographs, CenterPoint does know that roughly 30 percent of its transmission system in the metro area sustained serious damage.
The transmission system is more than mere poles and wires. It is the network of tall metal towers in grassy rights-of-way that bundle electricity and deliver it to neighborhood substations.
According to LeBlanc, the metropolitan area is bisected by a diagonal line stretching from Fort Bend County in the Southwest up to Humble in the Northeast. The transmission trouble is primarily south and east of that line, running from the Astrodome area to the Ship Channel and encompassing neighborhoods from Bellaire to Baytown.
Since CenterPoint has yet to assess all the damage, the company does not know what the exact problem is.
If high-speed winds crumpled the transmission towers — as happened in Louisiana during Hurricane Gustav over Labor Day — it could take a couple of weeks to bring those installations back to working status. If debris, such as tree limbs, are tangled in the high wires that would be an easier fix than reengineering the towers but could still take days.
"We just don't have those answers yet," LeBlanc said.
Ike snuffed out power not just for most of Houston, but also most of Southeast Texas, including Beaumont and Port Arthur.
Entergy spokesman David Caplan confirmed "more than 99 percent" of its 395,000 customers are offline, including parts of Navasota, most of The Woodlands, Huntsville, Bolivar Peninsula, Orange, Port Arthur and Beaumont.
The Texas New Mexico Power Co. is completely dark at this point. It provides power to low-lying communities near the coast including Friendswood, Texas City, Dickenson and Angelton.
Power is flowing to downtown Houston, the Texas Medical Center and Bush Intercontinental Airport because those areas have underground power lines, LeBlanc said. Elsewhere, electricity was spotty at best.
There were early reports Saturday morning from parts of Montrose and the Galleria area that power remained on. But even those neighborhoods that appeared to be spared, such as Willow Meadows near Reliant Center, got blinking lights for several minutes and then darkness as the long tail of the storm passed over, whipped up high winds after the eye passed.
The power companies are warning resident it will be a long, painstaking restoration process to get power flowing again. First priority goes to restoring power for key infrastructure, such as hospitals, wastewater management facilities and police and fire stations. LeBlanc says CenterPoint crews are already in parts of Houston working on that.
Then attention turns to getting electricity to key retailers, including grocery stores, gas stations and big-box home supply stores.
LeBlanc noted that the last time a major hurricane passed over Houston — Alicia in 1983 — about 750,000 CenterPoint customers lost power. In the first four days, power was restored for 550,000. Then it took a dozen days to restore power to the rest.
The magnitude of Hurricane Ike's damage is exponentially bigger.
The lack of electricity affects more than lighting, refrigeration, air conditioning and communication. It also impacts the water supply. Mayor Bill White is urging Houston residents to conserve water and drink only bottled water until government officials can determine whether the water supply has been tainted by flooding.
Through the night as Ike rolled across the region, popping sounds like blasts from a shotgun could be heart through the driving wind and rain. Those relentless pops were power transformers, which flow electricity to power lines, tripping off.
Here's why: When a power line snaps in the wind or is taken out by a falling tree or debris, the line "goes to the ground." Electricity has to flow somewhere. When the grid works properly, a controlled amount of power zips along the lines to electrify neighborhoods. But when a line goes to the ground, a surge of power flows to that uncontrolled, broken line.
The fuse link in the transformer box at the top of the power pole senses that dangerous overload in electricity and blows, knocking out the power.
To fix this problem, line workers have to repair both the power line and put a new fuse in the transformer. In some cases, the entire transformer has to be replaced. It's labor-intensive work.
On an ordinary day, a blown transformer is a relatively easy fix, but the sheer volume of downed power lines and blown transformers across the entire region guarantees it will be weeks before everybody has power again, LeBlanc says.
The Texas New Mexico Power Co. confirmed its main transmission line into Brazoria County is down. Many in that region evacuated and the power company is urging them not to come back yet.
Entergy spokesman Caplan said people who evacuated from its service areas "may want to carefully weigh" whether to return home immediately.
The power companies are all part of an employee sharing program with thousands of linesmen, tree trimmers and other safety personnel from around Texas and utilities in 23 other states on standby. They can come to the region to assist with power restoration, but their expertise is already in tight supply.
Louisiana still has some 60,000 customers without power due to Hurricane Gustav which hit the coast almost two weeks ago. Power workers are still trying to reconnect everyone there.
CenterPoint has 7,000 workers coming in starting Sunday, with more set to arrive Monday. But spokesman LeBlanc said the company was expecting 1 million customers to lose power. More than twice that expectation did, so CenterPoint has to round up more crews.
"We didn't think we'd lose virtually every customer on the overhead system," LeBlanc said.
"It's going to take a lot of manpower and it's going to be a balancing act to reapportion people to these affected areas," according to Entergy spokesman David Caplan.
"Safety trumps speed. In a sense, it takes as long as it takes. We can't accelerate things because of a storm situation because we cannot put workers in jeopardy or ask them rush things when there's an increased chance injury would occur."
lynn.cook@chron.com
