More than 1.6 million homes in Texas still had no power by Wednesday morning in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, the first hurricane to hit the U.S. this year. CenterPoint Energy, the Houston area’s main energy supplier, said Tuesday night that power had already been restored to 850,000 customers, one-third of the 2.26 million customers who had been impacted in Beryl’s path, reports UPI.
According to information supplied by carriers to the FCC, communications in the coastal counties in the Houston area — Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, and Matagorda — are the most impacted.
Out of a total of 4,656 cell sites in those counties, 913 were out of service as of Wednesday morning, or 19.6 percent. Most of those, 780, were due to power outages on Wednesday, according to the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting Service (DIRS.) Another 466 were operating on back-up power.
That compares to 1,335 sites not operating out of 4,656, or 28.7 percent, on Tuesday, according to DIRS.
Harris County had the most cell site outages as of Wednesday morning, 682 out of 3,606. The majority were due to lack of power. Fort Bend County had the second most outages, 99 out of 419, also due to lack of power.
Cable and wireline companies reported 527,700 subscribers out of service yesterday. This is down from 803,501 on Tuesday. This includes the loss of telephone, television, and/or internet services.
No television stations reported being off the air. Five FM radio signals were off-air, KLTW and four FM translators. That’s up from two FM signals on Tuesday. One AM station (KTEK) was off-air, compared to two on Tuesday.
Emergency calls to the Humble Police Department were not working yesterday. West Columbia Police Department calls were rerouted to other 911 call centers with location information. The Bay City Police Department and Matagorda County Sheriff’s Office calls have been rerouted to other 911 call centers since Tuesday.
Dickinson Police Department, Galveston County Sheriff’s Office, Galveston Police Department, La Marque Police Department, Santa Fe Police Department, and Texas City Police Department have been rerouted to an alternate trunk or admin line with location information.
The FCC Wireless Telecommunications Bureau granted a conditional waiver for Federated Wireless to enable continued 3.5 GHz operations despite power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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