Centerpoint was woefully unprepared and disorganized, and trying to claim otherwise is absurd. They spend way less on tree trimming than neighboring utilities. Their infrastructure is visibly decrepit. If there have been any significant efforts to trim trees and harden infrastructure over the last few years, I certainly haven't witnessed it. The utility pole in my back yard (which caused an outage last week) looks like it is about 200 fucking years old. It's rotting and falling apart. The crew that came to fix it told me they had to go get a part, because they didn't have a replacement on their truck, because the original was so old and outdated.
Centerpoint communicated virtually nothing for the first few days after the storm, and only after outcry and pressure began publishing any sort of outage map and restoration timeline estimates. Problem: the map and the timelines were utterly wrong and useless, even to this day. At no point did they provide widespread, accurate information. The map was even various shades of green, instead of red, to make it look better at a glance. People on Reddit had to manually edit it to even make it readable.
They hid behind "safety" as an excuse for the first two days of slow response, when everyone with a brain knows that these are trained out of town linemen, and a 15 minute tailgate safety meeting is probable the norm. Social media is chock full of anecdotes, anonymous reports, and rumors about trucks sitting idle for lack of any direction on where to go, untrained CNP office staff on the ground trying to coordinate repair crews, and inefficient paper-based ticketing systems. I'm flabbergasted that anyone thinks CNP did fine here.
All that said, I have a way different take on this that I've realized makes me an outlier here in Houston, in talking to my friends and neighbors. I'm not hardly mad at Centerpoint at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and a monopoly to boot. Its responsibility is maximizing returns for shareholders, not maximizing electricity uptime for Houstonians. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a snake not to bite. It's just what they do, that's their nature. Cutting down trees and upgrading infrastructure increases their costs. I'm sure they've done the math that it would cost more than the lost revenue from occasional outages. Are we really expecting that they would make improvements that benefit customers (who can't leave them) over shareholders, just out of the goodness of their hearts?
The only remedies for a private company with a monopoly are competition, nationalization, or a ball-busting regulator that is immune to capture. None of those things is going to happen, either for practical or political reasons. Centerpoint has a PR disaster every few years, customers and politicians get Very, Very Mad and then....life moves on. I think a big part of Centerpoint's usefulness is as a PR shield for the people that actually have the power to change the situation. If you're mad at Centerpoint, I think you're mad at the wrong people.