HOUSTON — About half a million Houston-area homes and businesses will still be without electricity next week, the city's largest utility said Thursday, stoking the frustration of hot and weary residents and leading a top state official to call the pace of recovery from Hurricane Beryl ''not acceptable.''
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 in Texas on Monday. And the company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online by Sunday. But many more will wait much longer.
''We know that we still have a lot of work to do,'' Ryan said during a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state's utility regulation agency. ''We will not stop the work until it is done.''
Ryan said that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Gulf Coast, close to where Beryl came ashore.
During a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pushed CenterPoint to work faster to relieve residents who have been without power for days and have been forced to seek air conditioning in community cooling centers and meals from food and water distribution points.
Compounding their discomfort was a new band of rainstorms that swept through the Houston area Thursday. The rain provided brief relief from the heat before temperatures were expected to creep back above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) over the weekend.