HOUSTON (AP) — About 500,000 customers still won’t have electricity into next week as wide outages from Hurricane Beryl persist and frustration mounts over the pace of restoration, an official with Houston’s biggest power utility said Thursday.

Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall on Monday. The company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online in the coming days, but others will wait much longer, he said.

“We know that we still have a lot of work to do,” Ryan said during a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s utility regulation agency. “We will not stop the work until it is done.”

Ryan predicted that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Texas coast, closer to where Beryl came ashore.

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AP AUDIO: Houston utility says 500K customers still won’t have electricity next week as Beryl outages persist

AP correspondent Jennifer King reports many Houston residents are struggling, and helping out neighbors, as they wait for electricity to be restored three days after the storm.

During a news conference on Thursday in Houston, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said it is “not acceptable” that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm. Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip, promised a state investigation into the storm response. Abbott has also called for an investigation.

“We are always going to have big storms in this area.… We