(Reuters) – More than 284,000 homes and businesses in Texas were still without power on Tuesday afternoon as utilities started restoring service faster than Tropical Storm Nicholas caused new outages, according to local utilities.
That is down from a peak of 529,000 customers out in Texas Tuesday morning.
The center of Nicholas was located about 30 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Houston and could cause life-threatening flash floods across the Deep South during the next couple of days, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.
Texas energy company CenterPoint Energy Inc, the company with the most outages so far, had about 238,000 customers without power in the Houston area Tuesday afternoon, down from a peak of around 454,000 earlier in the day.
The following table lists major outages by utility, including about 97,000 outages in Louisiana left from Hurricane Ida over two weeks ago since Nicholas is expected to move from Texas to Louisiana on Wednesday:
Power Company State/Province Out Now Served
CenterPoint TX 237,500 2,500,000
Entergy – Louisiana (from Ida) LA 89,900 over 1,000,000
PNM Resources – Texas New Mexico Power TX 24,400 260,000
AEP – Texas TX 14,600 1,057,900
Entergy – Texas TX 7,600 473,000
Dixie Electric Membership (from Ida) LA 6,900 112,400
Texas Total 284,100
Louisiana Total 96,800
(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Marguerita Choy)
