Half a million Houston-area homes and businesses still won’t have power into next week

Associated Press

HOUSTON (AP) — A utility company executive warns that about half a million Houston-area homes and businesses still won’t have electricity into next week as wide outages from Hurricane Beryl drag on. The acknowledgement Thursday led Texas’ lieutenant governor to describe the pace of power restoration as “not acceptable.” The Category 1 storm knocked out power to around 2.7 million customers when it made landfall in Texas on Monday. Affected residents have grown frustrated that the relatively weak storm could cause such disruption during the height of summer. CenterPoint Energy says power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses, and the company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back by Sunday. Others will wait much longer.