Council Session began on July 24th with a report from the former acting director of Public Safety and Homeland Security about how the city prepared for Hurricane Beryl. I asked how CenterPoint’s lack of accurate power outage maps impacted the City of Houston Office of Emergency Management’s (OEM) work in the aftermath.
OEM had to do extra, time consuming work to determine where to deploy resources because CenterPoint’s outage tracker was not working. OEM had to create new mapping systems to determine how to respond to this storm because of it. The outage tracker must be fixed immediately. When it is broken, it’s frustrating for everyone, but it also causes real consequences for deploying needed resources.
The broken outage tracker also had implications for our senior living facilities. OEM/HFD spent extra time checking on facilities because we didn’t know if they had power. My staff and I also spent countless hours checking on them as well. |