Some tweaks to this:
It's not "the electric company in Texas": Centerpoint handles the infrastructure in the Houston region. In TX, companies that sell power are separate from those who manage the poles and lines.
Its outage map cratered under demand after a derecho last month.
WTF. The electric company in Texas doesn't have a map of outages so people have been using the Whataburger App to figure out who lost power.
This is like when Homer was using the Krusty Burger map when they got lost at sea.
The Outage Map problem wasn't the source of data, but the resilience of the servers. They were overwhelmed and brought down in the derecho. Rather than put it back up and have it crash yet again, they are rebuilding it from the ground up, on a more robust platform. Should return this month.
Ah, I guess that makes sense. I certainly watched in real time after the derecho and the 6 day wait to get my power back then. Fortunately, this time we kept power all the way through.
I am kind of surprised that the map survived the 2021 freeze, though I seem to recall that Centerpoint made a platform change recently, which may be the root of the issue. But that memory may be faulty so ...
We got our power back relatively quickly from the freeze. Maybe the next day? Finding a plumber to re-pipe the house took 9 weeks though. The actual job took 6 hours.
