Nearly 800,000 Houston residents remain without electricity five days after the category-1 Hurricane Beryl downed power lines across the city. The outages come as the city is under heat advisory, with heat index values over 100F (37.8C).
Residents have described insufferable heat, sleepless nights, and fear for the wellbeing of elderly parents, young children and disabled relatives amid scorching temperatures.
“Night one wasn’t horrible. You just sleep with only a sheet. Night two, we ended up packing up and going to my mom’s house because it felt unbearable,” said Carly Cortez, 29, who lives just south-east of the city.
Cortez, a manager at a hotel that did not lose power, said her team received 2,000 phone calls in one day from people looking for available rooms. Normally, the average daily is a few hundred, she said.
“They’re all calling because they have elderly parents, young children, you know, worried they’re on day two and three with no power,” Cortez, 29, said. “But we sold out pretty quickly since Monday.”
Soaring demand for cool hotel rooms has driven up prices, with the state attorney general’s office receiving complaints of price gouging, according to local media.
Some residents have relied on generators to keep the lights and AC on. Cassandra Hollingsworth, 42, who lives north of Houston, said that she and her family have been sleeping on reclining couches in the living room, which has a generator-powered window AC unit.
“I’m disabled with spinal issues and rheumatoid arthritis, so that got to be wearing pretty quickly,” she wrote via email because she has poor cell service. She added that “constantly having to find gas and keep the generator going has also been a full-time job for my stepdad”.
“As of 11pm on 11 July, the power is still out with no clear timeline for its restoration,” she wrote.
It’s the second time in recent months that Houston has faced widespread power outages. In May, an intense storm left about 1 million people without power for several days.
CenterPoint Energy, the city’s primary utility company, said weakened trees, which have fallen on power lines, are to blame. But data from Whisker Labs, which tracks power outages, found the utlity’s grid is one of the most unstable in the US, with outages occurring at a rate more than twice the national average.
CenterPoint did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, who was traveling on an economic development trip in Asia has called for an investigation into Houston’s outages.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden declared a major disaster, releasing federal aid to the area.
Residents criticized CenterPoint for what they said was an inaccurate power restoration map and lack of communication about the timeline for power restoration.
“The new map, that CenterPoint only released after being flamed in the national press for having no outage tracker, looks like someone traced the streets on the city map using a tablet with a digital stylus like an Apple Pencil,” saidMatt Micik, 30, who lives in midtown.
The building Micik lives in warned residents that without electricity they would soon lose water.
“If you are in need of water to flush your toilet, feel free to collect water from the pool,” read an email from Micik’s building manager seen by the Guardian.
Rebecca Gregory, who lives in Cypress, a suburb in north-west Houston, has two children under two, and said she feels she cannot rely on CenterPoint or local government any more.
“I think the lineman crews are doing a great job and they had nothing to do with the power outages,” Gregory, 30, said.
“However, on a management level, I would have thought the freeze from February 2021 and the major power outages we experienced two months ago would make CenterPoint, the state of Texas, and the city of Houston, take a closer look at the problem – some people even lost their lives due to the loss of power.”
She added: “It just seems that each year it keeps getting worse. But it’s a reality we’re living in now and we need to be prepared for the worst.”
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