CenterPoint Energy is inspecting substations, staging response crews and clearing vegetation from power lines as a Gulf of Mexico weather system tracks toward the upper Texas coast.

The disturbance, designated Invest 97L, sat about 300 miles east of Galveston Island as of Sunday, Aug. 30, with a 50% chance of developing further, KHOU 11 reported. CenterPoint's own Aug. 30 press release said forecasts called for gusty winds and heavy rainfall starting Tuesday, Sept. 1, across parts of the Greater Houston region.

The utility did not say where its staging crews are positioned.

For Clear Lake area residents who lost power for days after Hurricane Beryl knocked out service to more than 2.2 million CenterPoint customers in July 2024, the company pointed to upgrades made since that disaster.

As of Sunday, Aug. 30, CenterPoint's community progress tracker showed the company had installed nearly 76,000 storm-resilient poles and completed more than 13,000 miles of tree trimming, according to KHOU 11. The tracker also showed 852 miles of power lines moved underground.

Those numbers are part of CenterPoint's Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, launched after Beryl. The program includes a new Emergency Operations Center, a partnership with weather and wildfire modeling firm Technosylva, and more than 25,000 hours of FEMA training across more than 800 employees, according to Community Impact.

"Our goal is to build the most resilient coastal grid in the nation to benefit our customers and communities," CEO Jason Wells said in a June 1 announcement of the company's expanded hurricane-season preparations.

The company got a real-world test of that readiness in July when Tropical Storm Bertha entered the Gulf. CenterPoint activated its Emergency Operations Center and mobilized more than 1,050 frontline crew members for that storm, according to a Community Impact report on Bertha.

CenterPoint also began installing 100 weather monitoring stations across its 12-county Greater Houston service area on April 28, 2025. The company described them as the first weather monitors owned by an investor-based utility in Texas.

CenterPoint urged customers to sign up for its Power Alert Service to receive outage updates and estimated restoration times by text, email or phone. The company's cloud-based Outage Tracker, available in English and Spanish, shows outages and restoration times by county, city and zip code.