As Tropical Storm Beryl bears down on Houston, a critical local resource on power outages and restoration timelines remains unavailable: the Outage Tracker operated by CenterPoint Energy, the city’s primary electricity provider.
CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area that highlights areas affected by electrical outages, has been offline since May due to “technical difficulties” caused by the derecho that swept through Harris County that month, CenterPoint officials said.
In an email Sunday, a CenterPoint representative said the company aims to replace the Outage Tracker with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July. The updated map will offer “the same level of outage information and functionality” as the previous tool and tolerate higher levels of customer traffic, which “limited performance” on the website during the derecho, utility officials…
