A transmission-line issue near Magnolia disrupted power Tuesday evening, prompting CenterPoint Energy crews to respond and county leadership to press for a firm restoration timeline.
KPRC Click2Houston reported a transmission-line issue near Magnolia. KHOU 11 reported that CenterPoint crews responded immediately to an equipment issue at an area substation; by Tuesday night, roughly 20,000 customers had already had their power restored. The utility also said planned infrastructure upgrade work already underway in the area was not connected to the failure, KHOU reported. Independent tracking from PowerOutage.us showed Montgomery County was the hardest-hit county during the event, per KHOU 11.
The disruption wasn't confined to Magnolia. CenterPoint also reported a separate electric outage affecting approximately 37,000 customers in the Tomball and Cypress region, per the same Click2Houston account. About 100 frontline CenterPoint workers were on-site restoring power Tuesday night, and the company said crews would keep working until every customer was back online, with an expectation that all customers from the outage would be restored by that night.
Keough Presses for a Timeline
Keough said the Magnolia outage stemmed from a transmission-line issue and that repairs were underway on the affected lines. A separate outage in Tomball-Cypress was attributed to an equipment issue at an area substation. Keough said the grid could begin to be energized as the transmission line is fixed, and he pressed CenterPoint for a timeline on when repairs would be complete, according to the outlet's report.
Keough's calls for firm answers aren't new: the judge issued a preemptive disaster declaration ahead of a January winter storm, telling NewsRadio 740 KTRH that the county had built an improved working relationship with CenterPoint following Hurricane Beryl.
A Region Still Rattled by Beryl
That posture traces back to July 2024, when Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to more than 2.2 million CenterPoint customers across Southeast Texas, an event that triggered state legislative hearings and Public Utility Commission of Texas oversight into how the utility communicates during outages, according to The Texas Tribune.
Magnolia's population surged 147.4% between 2020 and 2024, climbing from 2,359 to 5,836 residents, according to demographic data published by the City of Magnolia. CenterPoint's service territory covers more than 5,000 square miles.
Not the First Big Countywide Outage
Because Texas's deregulated energy market assigns grid delivery to a single regulated Transmission and Distribution Utility monopoly, Montgomery County residents have no ability to switch providers for power delivery regardless of reliability concerns, per Shop Texas Electricity.
CenterPoint is currently in the middle of implementing a $5.75 billion Systemwide Resiliency Plan for 2026 through 2028, approved through a settlement reached in June 2025, aimed at hardening 130,000 power poles, modernizing underground cables, and making all major lines self-healing, according to Latitude Media. Even so, localized equipment breakdowns like Tuesday's substation failure continue to draw public frustration while that long-term overhaul plays out.
The Magnolia outage follows a string of power disruptions across the Houston area this summer. Hoodline previously reported that Sharpstown families hit a fifth day without power as temperatures neared 100 degrees, forcing emergency responders to deploy cooling buses for residents in Harris and Montgomery counties. A separate outage left Westbury Square townhomes without power for nearly 40 hours in early September, while late-August storms cut power to 52,000 customers across CenterPoint's service area.
