The rain has been reduced to a drizzle, and the winds have abated, but for many Houston-area residents, Hurricane Beryl’s impact is far from over. In addition to downed trees, impassable roads, and widespread flooding, millions of Texas are now contending with an increasingly hazardous threat: the dangerous combination of summer heat and power outages.
Hurricane Beryl, which left at least 11 in the Caribbean islands dead—plus at least 4 Texans—has also left more than 2.1 million electric customers (the highest number in the provider’s history) without power across a wide swath of Houston, according to a statement released by CenterPoint Energy on X. By comparison, Hurricane Ike, a strong category 2 storm, left nearly the same number of customers without power after it made landfall in Galveston in 2008. Outside CenterPoint’s service area, more than 200,000 electric customers are without power in the areas surrounding Harris County—a zone stretching as far south as Galveston and as far north as Huntsville. More outages are expected as Beryl moves northward, downing trees and power lines along the way.
Although temperatures are expected to remain in the low 80s on Monday, Tuesday is expected to exceed 90 degrees for much of the region. CenterPoint hasn’t indicated how long the outages might last, but the company needed more than a week to fully restore power in May, when less than half as many customers lost power after a fast-moving derecho swept across the region. During previous extreme weather events in which power has been lost, Houstonians have retreated to their cars or stood in their showers to escape uncomfortable temperatures. Residents with access to a generator are urged to read up on basic safety guidelines before turning it on. “It’s not going to be the extreme heat we’ve seen in the past, but temperatures are still going to be very uncomfortable for people who are used to air-conditioning,” explained meteorologist and Space City Weather cofounder Eric Berger, whom this publication has labeled “Houston’s most respected weather expert.” “It’s the persistent humidity that’s problematic because it can be difficult to cool down, especially for older people and children.”
Berger, who lives in League City, lost power at 4 a.m. Monday. He said Houston might have fared even worse had Beryl’s timing been different. If the storm had hit the Texas coast a month from now, when summer temperatures often reach triple digits, there’s a decent chance the hurricane would’ve been stronger and electric customers more vulnerable in its aftermath. “To be clear, this was a direct hit on Houston,” he said. “But a larger and more powerful storm would not just have wreaked havoc with the power grid, but also caused widespread structural damages.”
As we reported last year, in the days after a dome of extreme heat settled over much of Texas in mid-June, one of the primary dangers posed by sweltering conditions in our state is that they’re often accompanied by a high dew point temperature—a measure of the amount of moisture in the air. Houston is synonymous with muggy summer air, but Austin and San Antonio have begun to catch up as global temperatures rise and warm air holds on to more moisture, which leads to higher and more dangerous heat indexes (a.k.a. the “feels like” temperatures).
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said Texans should consider the combination of summer temperatures and power outages produced by Beryl a “taste of the future.” Though elected officials have yet to acknowledge it, Dessler said, Texans are adapted to a twentieth-century world that no longer exists. One reason the public hasn’t fully grasped the growing threat, he said, is because the impact is “nonlinear,” meaning that the effect of climate change intensifies rapidly, often before people understand what’s happening around them. When Dessler gives talks about climate change to his students, he compares its impacts to a human body. When your body reaches 100 degrees, he said, you’re likely to feel bad and know you’re sick; when it goes above 104 degrees, you need to be hospitalized; when it reaches 106 degrees, you’re likely to die. “Every degree or two of warming is much worse than the previous degree or two, and that is essentially what we’re experiencing,” Dessler said.
Complicating matters, Dessler added, is the fact that Texas is uniquely vulnerable: the 367-mile-long coastline is subject to hurricanes and flooding; forests in East Texas can burn; Central and West Texas are prone to drought; the Panhandle has experienced massive wildfires; and the potential for extreme temperatures exists across the state. “We are as vulnerable as anyone else on the planet to climate change,” he said. If you’re going to remain in Texas, he said, you need to have medicine, water, and an emergency evacuation plan in place for your family and your pets. “In a world of storms,” he said, “we’re probably going to see a lot more power outages until we spend the money to harden power-distribution systems.”
