After hitting the Yucatan, Hurricane Beryl took a sharp turn and made Texas landfall straight over the Houston area. According to CenterPoint Energy (the linear successor to Houston Lighting and Power following deregulation) some 1,765,034 of 2,600,000 customers are currently without power. Yesterday evening that number was over 2.2 million, so progress is being made.
But CenterPoint’s outage tracker us offline, so it’s hard to tell which areas are affected.
And it’s not just Harris County. Large portions of Waller, Fort Bend, Wharton, Matagorda, Galveston, Brazoria, Chambers, and Montgomery counties all showed over 50% of residents without power.
Houston is a huge, sprawling city, and a certain amount of power outages are to be expected from a hurricane with 70 MPH winds. But given the widespread destruction wrought by Harvey and Ike (both more powerful hurricanes), one would have thought CenterPoint and other relevant energy producers would have conducted more vigorous tree trimming, but evidently not.
Acting Governor Dan Patrick (Governor Abbott is off on an economic development trip to Asia) declared 121 counties disaster areas.
Having endured Allen, I can assure you that living through an extended power outage in Houston during the summer is a hot, humid and deeply unpleasant experience.
So far only seven people have died, so let’s hope the death toll stays that low.
Update: A whole lot of Conroe and The Woodlands lack power right now.
Tags: Brazoria, CenterPoint Energy, Chambers County, Dan Patrick, Fort Bend County, Galveston, Houston, Hurricane, Hurricane Beryl, Matagorda County, Montgomery County, power outage, Texas, Waller County
Now imagine all your emergency and utility repair vehicles are BEVs. No electricity to charge ’em and they short out & burn going through every flood water puddle.
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I live in The Woodlands, we were without power 36 hours (10am Monday to 10:30pm Tuesday. Monday was mild, high of 80. Yesterday was closer to 95, unpleasant. Tried to find a hotel room Tuesday when it looked like power was not going to be restored in the near term. All hotels all the way to Waco were booked. Our energy company is Entergy, which (I think) is based in Louisiana. The service line between Entergy and Centerpoint is roughly the Harris county-Montgomery county line. Our neighborhood had very light damage. Lots of small debris. Southeast Woodlands had a lot of large trees down
“Hurricane force winds” always makes me chuckle. Here in NW Wyoming we refer to 45-50 MPH as “a little bit breezy”. Sustained 70 MPH winds are definitely windy, but that was a week ago Tuesday. When we actually get a wind warning it’s because semi’s are going to be knocked over unless they’re parked facing into the wind.
There’s a place not far from our house where the sustained winds ripped the asphalt off some of the roads.
Here on the eastern side of Lake Livingston, everthing went down hard at about 12:15 Monday. When things cleared up, I drove around and found stuff like three phase main double stacks ripped out of the ground, so restoring power is taking a few days. And on top of it all, heat advisories.
I have a 10kw Generac running loudly on the porch, and internet tethering over my cellphone. Fortunately I kept a couple of window units for this sort of situation.