Mayor John Whitmire and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced a new initiative to strengthen the city’s most critical facilities at a June 24 news conference.

The details

The Power Protection Initiative will ensure that essential public facilities maintain power during and after disasters or grid outages by equipping facilities with permanent natural gas generators.

“Houston is an essential city,” said Angela Blanchard, chief recovery and resilience officer for Houston. “It’s our port, our medical center, our energy production. We are essential to the region. We fuel the country. We power the world. It is that reason why we must guarantee that we can function, come hell, wind or high water.”

According to a document provided by the city, 140 facilities have been identified as “priority assets,” with 30 of those considered critical sites due to their public safety, utility or community support roles. These facilities include:

• Multiservice centers serving as places of refuge
• Fire and police stations
• Drinking water repump stations
• Wastewater lift stations
• Public libraries and community centers

“Through Beryl and the derecho, we discovered what we inherited was a great city, but we didn’t have the resiliency, we didn’t have the recovery in place,” Whitmire said. “You can't imagine what it's like to be at the emergency center and your fire chief says we've got 10 fire stations out of operations because we've lost power.”

Stay tuned

Installations of the generators will be completed over the next three years, according to the document. For example, Kashmere Gardens Multi-Service Center’s backup generator is scheduled to be completed in October, according to the city.Blanchard said a full list of facilities and the cost to install these generators are unknown at the moment, as the city continues to assess the facilities.

Also of note

Houston is expected to receive nearly $315 million in federal funding aid from HUD to help boost recovery efforts impacted by the 2024 derecho and Hurricane Beryl.

These two major events left the city without power for days, with Hurricane Beryl leaving more than 1.2 million people in Houston without power, according to previous Community Impact reporting. The derecho left nearly 1 million residents without power during the storms, with CenterPoint Energy having to replace 2,000 electric poles, 700 transformers and 800 miles of electrical wires to restore energy, a process that took roughly seven to eight days.In the city’s drafted plan to allocate the federal disaster aid, there is an item to allocate $51 million toward adding resilience measures to public facilities to provide backup power during disasters, according to previous Community Impact reporting.

“It takes a lot of strength to survive natural disasters, storms, floods and hurricanes,” Turner said. “Hurricanes can be soul-crushing experiences, to see your homes destroyed, your businesses destroyed, streets choked by debris, which we talked about earlier today, to see the pain prolonged after the storm, as you're struck without electricity.”