CenterPoint has been under constant fire from both customers and public officials ever since Hurricane Beryl left hundreds of thousands of Houstonians without power for over a week, with no idea as to when it might be restored.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today that he has opened an investigation into CenterPoint's response to Hurricane Beryl. Paxton's office says they are aware of allegations that CenterPoint's conduct may have had direct negative impacts on Houston residents.
In a statement to KTRH Monday afternoon, CenterPoint said, “Since Hurricane Beryl, we have demonstrated our absolute commitment to transparency and cooperation through our participation in three separate hearings at the PUCT, the Senate, and the House. We look forward to cooperating with the Texas Attorney General or any other agency and have made clear our commitment to upholding the values of our company. We urge any party that has information concerning these issues to come forward and provide such information to us, our regulator, or the Texas Attorney General immediately.”
Earlier on Monday, Senior Vice President of Public Policy Brad Tutunjian joined Houston's Morning News to talk about how CenterPoint has responded to criticism and the changes they have made to prepare for the next major storm.
Host Jimmy Barrett asked Tutunjian point blank, "If we were to have another Category 1 hurricane, a similar event, say three weeks from now... would the results be any different?"
Tutunjian responded simply by saying, "Absolutely." He went on to tout CenterPoint's new outage tracker, which should be far more resilient than the one that failed during the May storms due to heavy traffic.
Tutunjian said excessive traffic from data miners and data scrapers, as well as thousands of Houstonians, caused their in-house system to fail. He said, "Now that we have a brand-new application that is cloud-based, we will no longer have that issue."
You can listen to Jimmy and Shara's entire interview with Brad Tutunjian via the link below.