More than a million Houstonians face heat wave without power in Beryl's wake

HOUSTON (CNS) — Three days after Hurricane Beryl’s strong winds and heavy rain battered the city of Houston, more than a million homes and businesses have not had their electricity restored, leaving many to face dangerously high temperatures without air conditioning.

The storm itself left at least seven in the city dead from floods, falling trees and fire.

The National Weather Service on Thursday continued to issue a heat advisory for all of southeast Texas, warning of temperatures in the 90s, and a heat index as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit in some places and stressing that people should drink plenty of water and limit outdoor activities.

Though the heat Houston faces is not as extreme as the temperatures scorching western states like California and Nevada, as high as 115 in Las Vegas, the dangers of excess heat remain. Businesses across the city, from sports complexes to churches, have opened their doors to act as cooling centers. Houston’s Office of Emergency Management is also using the centers to distribute ice, bottled water and rations to residents in need. Restaurants that have power have faced large crowds and long lines in the days since the storm.

And hospitals in the city, already strained by the city’s power outages, have been forced to discharge patients without home power to cooling centers. NRG Arena, the stadium for the city’s NFL team, the Texans, has been turned into a field hospital with 250 beds.

Many Houston residents have turned their ire toward CenterPoint Energy, the largest electricity provider in the metro area, and its response to this latest storm. CenterPoint announced on Monday that some 2.2 million customers were out of power in the wake of the storm. As of 6:14 a.m. on Thursday, just over 1 million have seen their lights come back on.

The company said in a statement on its website that it expects to restore power for a further 750,000 customers by end of day on Sunday.

Reports indicate that CenterPoint’s power restoration efforts have gone much faster than in previous incidents, and the company has deployed roughly 11,500 workers to conduct repairs. Company officials tried to reassure the city at the Public Utility Commission meeting on Thursday morning.

But that hasn’t stopped Houstonians’ anger toward the company, particularly around one glaring technical fiasco: CenterPoint’s power outage map had been offline since a surprisingly strong storm in May. The electric company released a new live map, but residents have complained of a confusing layout and sometimes-inaccurate information.

The bug has led some residents to attempt to track outages using the app for Whataburger, a popular Texas fast food chain, instead.

Social media outlets such as X, formerly Twitter, Facebook, and the r/Texas and r/Houston forums on Reddit, have seen post after post decrying the operator’s lack of preparedness for this latest storm. One unknown Houston resident turned their message into graffiti, calling the company “CenterPointless” in a tag on a slab of concrete off Interstate 10.

Official sources have also called out the company for its slow response. Mayor John Whitmire criticized the company at a Houston City Council meeting on Wednesday and joined the council members in questioning CenterPoint executives, and the questioning continued the next day at a public utilities meeting.

The Houston Chronicle, the city’s largest local news outlet, has run several news pieces and editorials echoing the critical sentiment toward the company. The paper’s editorial board pulled no punches in a piece discussing CenterPoint’s response.

“By now, Houstonians have set a pretty low bar for CenterPoint Energy. We all know that regardless of the disaster Mother Nature cooks up, be it a freeze, derecho or hurricane, power outages are likely and it’s a crapshoot whether you’ll be lucky enough to keep your lights on," the board wrote. “What we do expect from our power utility is transparency. Preparation. Resiliency … What we got instead were vague promises cloaked in cryptic corporate-speak."

State officials, particularly those with the governor’s office, have also gotten flak for their slow reaction to the storm. Governor Greg Abbott was in South Korea for economic talks when the storm hit, and will be out of the state until July 13, leaving Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick as acting governor.

President Biden told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday that he was unable to reach either Abbott or Patrick until Tuesday afternoon, though Patrick has since disputed this claim on X, formerly Twitter.

Regardless of the claim, Patrick did not declare an emergency, a necessary step to allow Federal Emergency Management Agency resources into the area, until Tuesday.