Fred Flickinger, the representative for District E, and the other members of the Houston City Council knew a hurricane was coming in July.
City of Houston officials were hard at work coordinating calls with CenterPoint, preparing to bring in ice and water, as well as making sure infrastructure was in place.
During the storm, winds reached over 80 mph in their peak and officials had significant concerns.
“Obviously…you’re concerned about trees coming down and people getting hurt,” said Flickinger, who represents Kingwood and other Houston residents.
After the storm, the city’s main priority was to get the electricity back on, especially for locations where power is crucial.
“We were in constant contact with CenterPoint about critical places that were without electricity,” Flickinger said. “For example, the Kingwood Hospital. I believe it was without electricity for five days. They’ve got a backup generator, but the backup generator doesn’t fully energize the hospital. So there were problems with that, that they were not back on the grid.”
The problems didn’t stop there. Debris littered the streets of Kingwood. While there were as many as 310 trucks working, communication was an issue.
“They just basically gave large areas of town and said, okay, this is where we’re working,” Flickinger said. “So people were frustrated with not being able to fully be aware of when their debris was going to be picked up.”
Another issue Flickinger dealt with was the Texan heat. With sweltering temperatures as high as 100 degrees, the lack of air conditioning was felt by residents. After the Kingwood Community Center on Rustic Drive regained power, a cooling center was set up. Flickinger and others distributed ice, water and food.
Flickinger was especially concerned about the assisted living facilities and senior centers.
“There’s a number of them in Kingwood that I think most people aren’t really familiar with,” Flickinger said. “We were delivering water and ice to those people regularly, and just trying to see what we could do to help them out – whatever they needed before they got power restored.”
Flickinger is already trying to make changes for the future. He said he believes strengthening the city’s power grid is the answer.
“The biggest thing that can be done is to harden the bridge, which CenterPoint is working on,” Flickinger said. “And in fact, it’s kind of ironic, they were at City Council about three months ago, I think, with a presentation on hardening the grid. This is a statewide initiative. The state government has asked the utilities to look at what they can do to harden the grid, to ensure that we have as few [power outages] as possible.”
When the clean up around Kingwood was happening, residents became frustrated and often harassed CenterPoint workers and those trying to clean up the debris. Flickinger said he would like to see residents show more compassion with workers in future situations.
“All the city workers that are trying to collect debris and restore everything, they’re all dealing with the same issues that we’re dealing with as well,” Flickinger said. “Not only are they having to go out and try to get everything back at the speed, but, they get home and they don’t have any electricity either.”
In addition, Flickinger said people living in Kingwood can help themselves by better preparing themselves for future storms.
“I think, the individual residents of the community probably need to do some more to make sure that they’re able to manage their day to day lives without power for three or four days,” Flickinger said. “Because, unfortunately, living on the Gulf Coast, we are going to have hurricanes.”
