Authors: Juan A. Lozano and Nadia Larson
HOUSTON (AP) — About 500,000 Houston-area homes and businesses will remain without power next week, the city's largest utility said Thursday, frustrating hot and exhausted residents and causing Top state official calls slow recovery from Hurricane Berrier “unacceptable”.
Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said more than 1 million homes and businesses have had power restored since Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday. The company expects to have hundreds of thousands of customers back online by Sunday. But many more will have to wait longer.
“We know we have a lot of work to do,” Ryan said at a meeting of the Public Utilities Commission of Texas, the state's utility regulator. “We won't stop working until it's done.”
Ryan said next week's extended outages will be concentrated along the Gulf Coast, near where Beryl comes ashore.
At a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged CenterPoint to speed up efforts to help residents who were without power for days and were forced to seek air conditioning at community cooling centers and receive supplies from food and Food is sought at water distribution points.
A new round of heavy rain that swept through the Houston area on Thursday made them even more uneasy. The rain provided temporary relief from the scorching weather, with temperatures expected to climb back into the upper 90s Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) over the weekend.
Acting Gov. Patrick said “folks, this is unacceptable” and that 500,000 customers may still be without power a week after the storm.
Both Patrick and Abbott pledged that the state would investigate storm response measures. Texas has experienced several major storms over the past two decades.
“This area is always going to get big storms. … We have to make sure they're as prepared as they should be,” Patrick said. “It's a terrible situation for people to be in such hot weather.”
Patrick and Abbott also have sparred with the White House over the timing of requesting a federal declaration for the region and whether it would delay help with storm cleanup and other emergency costs.
According to PowerOutage.us, the Category 1 hurricane (the weakest type) left about 2.7 million customers without power when it made landfall.
Residents were frustrated that such a relatively weak storm could cause so much damage in the middle of summer.
Some criticized utility companies and state and city officials for not preparing for the storm, for the slow recovery process, and for CenterPoint's online map being wildly inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods restored when power was lost.
The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it brought in to help with recovery efforts were not in the Houston area when the storm arrived. Initial forecasts were for the storm to blow ashore farther along the Gulf Coast, near the Texas-Mexico border, and then move toward Houston.
Ryan said the vast majority of outages were caused by downed trees and branches, and workers had to survey more than 8,500 miles of power lines for damage.
Beryl is blamed for the deaths of at least eight people in the United States, including one each in Louisiana and Vermont, and six in Texas. Earlier, 11 people had died in the Caribbean.
However, the storm's lingering impact for many in Texas was a shock to power supplies that left much of the nation's fourth-largest city sweltering.
Mallary Cohee said her duplex in New Caney, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Houston, has been without power since Monday. She said her “little rural community” was “a mess” with fallen trees everywhere, so she stayed in a hotel in Houston.
Cosi said she initially felt she could live with the lack of air conditioning because during her two-year sentence, she had been able to get by without it in the summer.
“I thought, 'I can do this. I can ride it. If I can spend some time without heat, without air conditioning, I can probably do it,” Cohee said. “But when you don’t even have fans, it’s a completely different game.”
Clean water has also become an issue. Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Department of Emergency Management, said more than 160 boil water notices were issued in the region Thursday and more than 100 wastewater treatment plants were closed.
The Texas Hospital Association said the “vast majority” of hospitals in the region are dealing with some kind of problem caused by Beryl, including water and wind damage, power and internet connectivity issues, staffing shortages or transportation issues.
Carrie Kroll, the association's vice president of advocacy, public policy and political strategy, said hospitals are seeing “an extraordinary number” of people coming to emergency rooms with symptoms of heat stroke and dying from cleaning up debris. Injuried.
As of Wednesday evening, hospitals had sent more than 100 patients who could not be discharged to Houston sports and event venues without power and set up an emergency room, said Brent Taylor, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management. Area for 250 people.
___ Lathan reported from Austin, Texas, and is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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