“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – Albert Einstein

The city of Houston took it on the proverbial chin once again when Hurricane Beryl struck the Texas gulf coast. Although only a Category 1 storm, Beryl’s impact left more than 2.2 million customers without electricity and damaged countless homes and automobiles. The death toll continues to grow with at least 23 people having died due to various storm related causes as of this post.

The finger pointing began even before recovery efforts started with CenterPoint being the main target of people’s anger. Politicians have been holding press conferences and updates demanding answers on why the energy giant was not ready to deal with what was supposed to be a minor storm.

“Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

Now to be fair, building an electrical grid that can withstand hurricane force winds is not easy. Houston’s geography makes putting lines underground problematic and very expensive (guess who would pick the check on that, it ain’t the power company ). Heavy vegetation (aka The Livable Forest) in many communities also make restoring power a nightmare for power companies. People love living among the tall trees until they fall on a power line, or worse a roof.

It is also a big task to coordinate line men and women to come from other states to help repair the grid. Each grid is different and requires workers are trained so they can safely make the necessary repairs. Plus you have to provide housing, food and other resources all to a moving target. Remember weather forecasters predicted the storm was first supposed to hit Brownsville, then they said Corpus Christi and then maybe Matagorda Bay. Again, it’s not easy.

But, to also be fair, one of the key components of a crisis is effective communication and that’s where CenterPoint clearly fell flat. Non-working outage maps, lack of emails/texts to customers and inconsistent messaging with the media threw fuel on a fire that was already raging. And why on earth would media tell its audience to go to the CenterPoint Outage map knowing it did not work.

It also did not help their messaging when the CEO was interviewed next to a thermostat showing the room at a comfortable 70 degrees. Where were the public relations people? They should have had him on-site where repairs were taking place. That photo would have helped demonstrate his commitment to working toward restoring power.

Still the politicians continue their media circus, grandstanding and acting surprised, very much like Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca who is shocked that gambling is taking place at Rick’s Café while collecting his winnings. One has to wonder how much the politicians collect from their winnings, I mean campaign contributions from CenterPoint.