Power to the People

Wondering where your neighborhood or ZIP code stands in the unprecedented outage left behind by Ike? Look no further. Centerpoint has set up an informative website that is updated every twelve hours, showing areas with power and allowing to you to monitor their progress: Outage and Restoration Updates. You can browse the data through a general outage map or by checking out percentages by ZIP code.

As of last night at 8:00 p.m., 1.56 million Centerpoint customers were still without power, which represents 69% of their customer base. No surprise, as this power outage is confirmed to be the largest in Texas' history. Centerpoint only serves Houston, however, which means that this website won't be useful to Galveston and surrounding areas or neighborhoods to the north, such as The Woodlands.

Texas-New Mexico Power, which serves the southern coastal communities such as Angleton and Texas City, reported that only 58% of their customers were without power. In stark contrast, Entergy, which serves northern and eastern suburbs of Houston, reported this morning that a whopping 94% of their customers are still without power this morning.

Perusing the list of outages by ZIP code on Centerpoint's website will either make you feel great (hey! only 11% of my ZIP code is without power!), bad (still 100% without power in all these ZIP codes?!?), or just plain guilty (I'm the only one in my ZIP code with power?). Houstonist falls squarely into the "bad" category right now, but greedily hopes to move into the "guilty" or "good" categories at some point today.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user art luvEr.