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Julia Dimmitt thought she was reading the map wrong.
The retired Houston ISD area superintendent kept checking to see when power would be restored to her East End home, but CenterPoint Energy’s color-coded outage tracker seemed to ignore her address.
“I kept thinking, ‘Am I not reading this correctly?’” she said Wednesday evening, hours after her power had been restored.
Last Thursday’s deadly windstorm knocked out power to 922,000 CenterPoint customers across the Houston area, according to Brad Tutunjian, CenterPoint’s vice president of regulatory policy. For those left in dark and sweltering homes as temperatures reached the low 90s over the weekend, that lack of power amounted to a pressing emergency after the fast-moving storm had left town.
An absence of readily accessible and available information from CenterPoint, which experienced its own outage after a surge of website traffic led its outage tracker to crash, further added to the sting.
Houstonians who felt left in the dark in more ways than one by their power company rallied on social media to help keep each other informed. In some instances, locals were able to flag elected officials about misinformation on the outage maps and ask for help restoring their power.
In Dimmitt’s case, she scoured social media and found neighbors on X, formerly known as Twitter, who also were without power, asking the same questions. By Saturday, she and her shaggy dog packed up and headed to a friend’s house for relief from the scorching heat.
Each day, Dimmitt returned to her home in Eastwood, an area known for its dense assemblage of live oaks that frame the streets. The lush tree coverage is the community’s calling card, but in a windstorm like last week’s derecho, it can be Eastwood’s downfall.
As Dimmitt drove around, she documented downed trees blocking streets and snagging wires, tagging CenterPoint, as well as local elected officials in her posts.
That, she said, was the key to her power returning Wednesday.
On Tuesday night, she heard her phone ding with a private message from Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, whose Precinct 2 includes Dimmitt’s neighborhood. He requested more details about her local outage.
“He was like, ‘I’ll get right on this,’ and we saw the trucks this morning,” she said Wednesday. “It just reminded me that it never hurts to politely advocate for yourself.”
In the dark about the Houston power outage
Jennifer Vardeman, associate professor and director of the University of Houston’s Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, said CenterPoint utilized several common crisis communication strategies throughout its storm response, but has room for improvement in its tactics.
“More and more, what we’re seeing is that organizations can’t hide when there is a crisis,” Vardeman said. “They can’t depersonalize the experience, especially when it’s something as integral and as essential as power and air conditioning in Houston’s summer heat.”
David Strickland, a former journalist turned crisis communications expert at his own company, Strickland Communications, said CenterPoint dropped the ball with its messaging to the public and should have had a better plan in place to beef up its social media and better relay updates to customers.
“They should have been honest with the public about what’s going on and how they were going to take steps to alleviate that problem,” he said. “The public is pretty forgiving to people, as long as they feel as though they’re being told what’s going on.”
Strickland said it is likely CenterPoint was not properly staffed because there was not advance warning of the derecho like there would be with a developing hurricane. However, he said, “that’s what crisis communication is about — dealing with the unexpected.”
CenterPoint did not directly respond to the criticisms, but issued a statement noting it had activated its “comprehensive response plan” that included in-field resources and office based employees.
“We understand and appreciate the need for timely, consistent and transparent information for our elected officials, agency staff, regulators, customers, media and other stakeholders,” the company said in a statement Friday. “That’s why the CenterPoint team operated 24-hours-a-day during emergency response.”
CenterPoint said that since the storm, it has issued 15 news releases, posted on social media nearly 250 times, conducted 40 media interviews and responded to thousands of social media messages. The company also said it answered thousands of phone calls and touted its text message updates through its Power Alert Service.
“The derecho on May 16 was an extraordinary severe weather event,” said John Sousa, Vice President, Corporate Communications at CenterPoint Energy, “and I’m incredibly proud of the extraordinary efforts by our team.”
The energy company used its social media to highlight first responders and employees, thank community partners and called attention to vital areas where power was restored, such as community centers or senior living facilities. These practices, Vardeman said, often are used to help personalize a large organization — and to get people to be more sympathetic.
However, Vardeman said where the company faltered was rarely having an official from CenterPoint at storm updates with officials. Though it is not an “industry standard,” Vardeman said, it could have instilled more confidence in residents that the power company was sympathetic to what was going on and actively working with officials.
CenterPoint employees have been making more public appearances in recent days, Strickland said the company missed an opportunity to address customers throughout the rampant outages.
“They should have been there, they should have been taking questions,” Strickland said. “Someone should have been assuring the public that their grandmother who was sitting at home on a ventilator, that her power is going to get turned back on.”
CenterPoint said it had company representatives at “every city and county news conference” but acknowledged that they only publicly spoke at one press conference hosted by Commissioner Garcia.
As social media has become more prominent in everyday life, Vardeman said there is a desire and need for organizations to provide customized communication, particularly during a crisis.
Five days after the storm, more than 100,000 people remained without power. Desperate, they turned to social media to plead with CenterPoint for help or guidance about when they might see their power turned back on. Vardeman said a strategy that the energy company should look at in the future is responding to even more people individually, and improving its mapping tools or power-restoration estimates.
“People are desperate,” she said. “They’re trying to find whatever way they can to get CenterPoint to come and give them their power back. They were still allowing comments (on social media) but they’re not engaging at the kind of personal level that I think people are wanting.”
CenterPoint’s power outage map goes down
Lory Rutledge was one of the few who did receive a direct response from CenterPoint on social media.
“Not a single truck in sight since it all began,” she wrote on X, accompanied by a photo of massive trees blocking streets near her home in Spring Branch’s Shadow Oaks subdivision. “Still no power, website says it was restored yesterday.”
Rutledge said she had called CenterPoint but found more success with social media. For one, she received a direct reply from CenterPoint, which asked Rutledge to report the outage via a direct message. And like Dimmitt, she also heard from Garcia, who requested her exact location.
“It’s easier to make a post, because people are outspoken and they’re more capable of expressing their thoughts and concerns when they’re not on the telephone, and they have time to think through what they’re going to say,” she said Thursday after her power was restored. “I think that’s one of the benefits of social media.”
Still, she remains dismayed that she had to take things into her own hands. Throughout her six days without power, she said she felt gaslit and lied to by the energy company.
CenterPoint’s primary outage tracker map was often not working properly following the storm. Eventually, the company switched to a different page that showed the number of outages along with the number of customers affected and restored, but it lacked its usual interactive map that Houstonians have come to rely upon during such disasters. It then posted static images showing the projected restoration schedules before its interactive map was fixed; even then, many customers reported problems with it.
The company said it was aware that many homes without power were not properly reflected on that map, due to “nested outages,” which affect small subsets of homes without impacting larger neighborhoods.
“It was frustrating, this map that they have that was not accurate ever, and it would say, ‘You’re going to be restored on this day,’ but it would come and go, and you don’t see anybody,” Rutledge said. “And then it says you were restored, but you weren’t.”
“We were ready to respond to a storm, but not ready to respond to a storm of this magnitude,” CenterPoint’s Tutunjian told City Council on Wednesday.
CenterPoint set a goal to have 98 percent of customers back online by the end of Wednesday — a huge win when calculated by percentages. With nearly 1 million people knocked out of service during the storm, “even at 98 percent, that’s still about 20,000 customers that are without power,” Tutunjian said.
It took until Thursday afternoon for the total number of homes still without power to dip below 20,000, according to the company’s outage tracker.
Broken trust
More than 7,000 lineworkers joined the slow slog toward restoration — some from as far away as New Mexico and Missouri.
“Immediately after the storm there’s a lot of questions regarding, ‘How long is it going to be?’” Tutunjian said. “And the challenge for the utility is we have to be able to understand exactly what is the extent of the damage on our facilities. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s with boots on the ground.”
Dimmitt and Rutledge said they understand the effort the utility company had to undertake, but they cannot ignore the problems they encountered.
Strickland said he expects CenterPoint will do a “self examination” to determine what went wrong. Once that is done, he said it would be beneficial to the energy company to send its customers a letter or email to address the missteps and how it plans to avoid those in the future.
“They’ll take a hit at the beginning of this, but at the end if they can show people that they are trying to address these situations, they’ll come out on top and advance their image even further,” he said.
Vardeman, the crisis communications expert, said she believes that CenterPoint lost much of the community’s trust throughout the disaster and hopes that within the company months that the company will take the time to solicit feedback from customers through social media and in-person town hall meetings about how to improve future communications.
“I genuinely believe that talking to people directly, even when they’re upset at you about something, talking directly and finding out what it is that they want and how they want the relationship to go is going to be most fruitful for them,” she said.
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