Days after Beryl, oppressive heat and no power for more than 500k in Texas

Andrew Johnson celebrated his 34th birthday on Friday in a home with no power, confined mostly to his bedroom where one window air conditioning unit was powered by a generator. He's one of the hundreds-of-thousands of Houston-area residents still without any electricity in the sweltering heat, more than five days after Hurricane Beryl rolled through.

The storm hit Texas in the early morning hours on Monday as a Category 1 hurricane, taking down trees and power lines, and prompting some to sleep in their cars to stay cool. At least 13 died in the region alone, the Houston Chronicle estimated.

Johnson, who works in the oil and gas industry, said he and his fiancée are some of the lucky ones. They haven't had power since about 4 or 5 a.m. on Monday, but their friends from other parts of Texas brought them generators and gasoline. They've been able to power the essentials: their fridge, freezer and room where they sleep.

Still, he said, "Yesterday was a little bit of a downer day, waking up to this, living on generator power and no end in sight for not getting power."

The couple was able to drive to a different part of Houston for a birthday dinner at a restaurant with power, but Johnson said he's looking forward to celebrating with the power fully restored. In the meantime, he said all he can do is rely on his support system, and provide one for others. A neighbor couple in their 80s has been visiting Johnson's house to sit in his bedroom and cool off in front of the window unit because they don't have a generator, he said.

Amid the outages, the National Weather Service issued heat advisories for the Houston region from Tuesday through Friday with heat indices reaching 106. Temperatures Saturday cooled somewhat with rain to peak in the 90s, but the NWS forecast on Saturday indicated high temperatures on a “generally increasing trend” into next week, reaching the mid to upper 90s.

In the wake of major disasters, extended power outages can have dangerous, and even deadly, consequences, said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Climate School. The very young, the elderly and anyone with underlying health issues are especially at risk.

"We often see that indirect deaths from disasters outnumber direct deaths, and that comes from a variety of factors, including outages, including stress on people," he said. "You have people who have to work outside for extended periods of time. Food spoilage for people who are food insecure, transportation insecure so basically don't have extra money to run to the store, don't have a car to drive into a neighborhood that has power."

BERYL AFTERMATH:Heat drives Texans to sleep in cars

Utility company faces scrutiny, calls for accountability

Many Texas residents have pinned blame on CenterPoint, the Houston-based company that provides power in the region. Graffiti on the side of I-10 read "CenterPointless" after days had passed with no power for over 1 million customers, Houston Public Media reported. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the state's political leaders would hold the company accountable for its lack of preparedness.

"There's blame on all sides," Schlegelmilch said. "It's convenient for government to point at the utility, and probably appropriate in this case to ask hard questions of the utility, but that doesn't let regulators or government off the hook in terms of additional planning."

Houston has long been known to be hurricane-prone, Schlegelmilch said, and Beryl – while serious and destructive – wasn't anywhere near the kind of storm that the city should be prepared for.

"It does raise a lot of questions in terms of, why is it taking so long? Why wasn't this prepared for? Why did it take people off guard?" he said.

CenterPoint has said it's working to restore power to about 85% of impacted customers before the end of the weekend. At peak outage, over 2.2 million people were without power. As of Saturday afternoon, more than 550,00 customers were without power — a number that had been decreasing throughout the day, according to CenterPoint's records.

"Based on the projections that we were getting, we believed that we were staffing appropriately. What then happened, as often does with weather – it's unpredictable – is that we had a more significant impact than what was projected for our area," Alyssia Oshodi, a spokesperson for the company, told NPR in response to criticisms that CenterPoint didn't have enough out-of-town staff ready to go in advance of the storm.

USA TODAY has reached out to CenterPoint for comment.

"CenterPoint must be ready for any storm in the Gulf that could possibly hit Houston, no matter what the forecast says," Patrick said in a social media post.

And in the aftermath of the storm, residents were calling for better communication from CenterPoint on its progress. Johnson said he didn't totally blame the company for being unprepared, because Beryl's predicted track didn't include Houston early on, but now, he can't get a clear answer when he calls for updates to the power in his neighborhood.

Near downtown Houston, Ivan Zamarron, 32, questioned the figures put out by CenterPoint and government officials. A map put out by the company appeared to show that power had been restored to his home when the lights were still off, Zamarron said.

As climate change and variations in weather patterns mean higher demand on power infrastructure and a future of increasingly extreme storms, Schlegelmilch said it's important for state leaders and power companies alike to take a look at their priorities for funding and invest in hardening and modernizing the power grid.

"We're really behind in terms of being able to meet the need for day-to-day (power usage), as well as resiliency for storms like like Beryl," he said.

Low-income and communities of color take the brunt of those impacts, he said.

"We see this along racial lines. We see it along socioeconomic lines. Even though climate change is affecting all of us, it's affecting the most vulnerable among us, and these are the echoes of housing policy from a century ago drawn along racial lines, socioeconomic lines, that still haunt us to this day," Schlegelmilch said.

'We cannot live like this'

Zamarron continued looking for gas Saturday morning. The apartment he and his sister share — located just across the bridge from downtown — had been without power for six days. They’ve stayed with their friends nearby who have power while their three dogs are in boarding, though Zamarron decided to sleep at his apartment last night, on the tile floor with the front door open to bring air. Indoors was 88 degrees, which Zamarron said was cool because of recent rains.

The manager of an insurance company, Zamarron said he’d been fortunate they have a place to go and they have the means to work at coffee shops or go to a hot chicken restaurant twice a day, he said. When it gets too hot, he said, he’d go sit in his car for AC. Others aren’t as lucky.

At a gas station near downtown, he saw workers sitting outside because the store’s power was out.

One of Zamarron's friends in the suburb of Katy, to the west, still has no power, while another friend in Pasadena, a suburb to the east, only had power restored Saturday afternoon. Zamarron lives between the two. The area from Katy to Pasadena stretches nearly 50 miles.

Born and raised in Mexico, Zamarron questioned why a major American city could stay this long without power. His home country, he said, is considered poor, but this would never happen for days on end there. He placed blame on energy providers.

“They’re the only ones benefiting from it,” he said. “But this is a huge city. We cannot live like this. It’s hot. It’s horrible.”

'Tangible blessing' in Humble

Dominion Church International, located in the Houston suburb of Humble, has been doing what it does best — serving others, said the Rev. Paul Anthony Hardin, the church’s bishop and senior pastor of the church. In an interview with USA TODAY, he called it “tangible blessing,” with congregants on Saturday taking on debris and downed tree removals, checking in with elderly people, and gathering food to prepare a Sunday service meal. The church never lost power, and it has stayed open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. for people to cool down indoors with air conditioning, Hardin said.

Hardin and his wife, also a pastor of the church, have had a dozen people stay over at the parsonage, the church home where they live, since they only lost power for a day. Many staying with them have health issues that make it difficult to withstand the heat, he said.

On Sunday, Hardin planned to have church service at 11 a.m. at a nearby school gymnasium that can fit more people than the church. Service will be short so they can serve spaghetti afterward for people in need of meals.

Last Sunday, hours before the widespread outages, he delivered a sermon part of his biblical series on Joseph and character. Hardin said Joseph faced hardships throughout his life but persisted in his blessing to people. He never finished his sermon, so he plans to continue the message Sunday.

“Character really is tested in adversity,” he said. “This is a tremendous opportunity for us to be in community, to love one another. Not just by what we say, but by what we do.”