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A new University of Houston survey seems to show that CenterPoint still has a long way to go when it comes to earning back public trust. The study conducted by the Hobby School of Public Affairs found that of the 2,300 voters polled, 69% were concerned with power outages.
Some of those concerns may be legitimate, due to the unfortunate reality that here in Houston, any major storm will result in at least some outages. That's according to David Holt with the Consumer Energy Alliance, who said, "When you have a large hurricane, it's inevitable that power is lost in parts of Houston. That's kind of a reality of life."
Holt went on to say that despite widespread concerns about CenterPoint's ability to respond to a major storm, they've actually made a lot of progress. He said, "CenterPoint has done an excellent job of adding more wires and more redundancies. I'm actually very impressed with how they've handled it."
Unfortunately, these major improvements from CenterPoint aren't going to just magically enable them to win back public trust. The only way for them to do that is another major storm. Holt explained, "It's a little bit of that 'Proof is in the pudding' situation. It's gonna take another storm, citizens seeing the fast response, and the overall impact of everything CenterPoint has done over time."