Storms knock out power for thousands across Harris County

Lightning, not wind alone, drove the sharpest damage across Harris County and the greater Houston area as storms swept through around 3 a.m. Saturday. CenterPoint said the strongest activity hit between 2 and 3 a.m., and the system produced about 56,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes between 3 a.m. and 7 p.m., helping trigger roughly 190,000 customer outages.

The restoration pace was fast, but uneven. By 5 p.m. Saturday, CenterPoint said it had restored power to about 155,000 customers, with about 10,000 still without service. By 9 p.m., KPRC Click2Houston reported roughly 168,000 customers were back online and about 4,500 remained out. By Sunday morning at 10 a.m., only about 700 CenterPoint customers still lacked power. CenterPoint later said more than 99% of its electric customers had service restored by May 27.

The outage response stretched into the holiday weekend, with more than 2,000 frontline workers and contractors deployed and the company’s Emergency Operations Center activated. CenterPoint said it restored power to 122,000 customers from the overnight and early morning storms, with an average restoration time of about 100 minutes. In an earlier storm update on May 20, the utility said about 96% of its 2.9 million customers were not impacted by the earlier waves of thunderstorms, about 95,000 customers had already been restored, and the average restoration time was less than 79 minutes.

The impact was broader than one utility. Entergy Texas reported thousands of customers were out at one point, including about 2,500 without power at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, showing how widely the weekend storms spread across the Houston area. Meteorologist Anthony Yanez noted that big lightning counts are not unusual in this part of Texas, but the size of this storm complex stood out.

Weather concerns did not end with the first round of outages. The National Weather Service said a Flood Watch remained in effect through Monday evening for Harris County and surrounding counties on May 23, with multiple rounds of showers and thunderstorms, locally heavy rainfall, and a marginal risk of severe weather across Southeast Texas. On May 24, the watch was cancelled for portions of south central and southeast Texas, but forecasters still warned that isolated thunderstorms could occur and rainfall totals were expected to stay limited.

For Harris County households, the weekend was a reminder that a single overnight storm can quickly test the grid, emergency response, and neighborhood resilience. When lightning, flooding risk, and scattered repairs hit at once, even a fast restoration still leaves thousands waiting through the heat, the dark, and the holiday weekend.