Beryl leaves millions of Texans without power as dangerous heat descends on the region
Beryl slammed into southern Texas as a Category 1 hurricane Monday, knocking out power to more than 2.5 million homes and leaving at least 8 people dead in Texas and Louisiana.
The storm – now a tropical depression – unleashed flooding rains and winds that transformed roads into rushing rivers, ripped through power lines and tossed trees onto homes, roads and cars. As it hurtles northeastward, it is bringing flooding and the threat of tornadoes across eastern Texas, western Louisiana and Arkansas.
As difficult recovery and cleanup efforts are underway in southeast Texas, including the Houston area, extreme heat will bear down on the region Tuesday and Wednesday, creating hazardous conditions for those working outdoors or without adequate cooling.
A heat advisory is in place Tuesday for southeast Texas, where heat indices – a measure of how the body feels under both heat and humidity – could hit 105 degrees and high temperatures in the 90s are forecast across the region.
“The lack of proper cooling combined with many people outdoors cleaning up after Beryl could produce dangerous heat conditions,” the National Weather Service in Houston said. Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather in the US, killing more than twice as many people each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.
But restoring power to hard-hit communities will be a multi-day undertaking, according to Thomas Gleeson, the chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. And in the coastal city of Galveston, city officials have estimated it could be as many as two weeks before electricity is restored.
Texas utility CenterPoint Energy has borne the brunt of the outages, with nearly 2 million customers in the dark Monday night, according to PowerOutage.us. Though the company had braced for Beryl’s impact, it said the damage was more severe than it had expected.
“The storm veered off the originally expected course and more heavily impacted the company’s customers, systems and infrastructure than previously anticipated, resulting in outages to more than 2.26 million customers at its peak,” it said.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire, whose home was also without power Monday, said CenterPoint and the city are “fully aware” of how pressing electricity restoration is.
“We’re going to take care of every community. No community is favored over another community. Every Houstonian is important to us. We’ll get your power on as quickly as possible,” he said.
Beryl’s path through the US
At its peak, Beryl was a record-shattering Category 5 storm but has since been reduced to a far less powerful tropical depression with winds of 35 mph. Despite weakening, Beryl will still produce flooding and tornadoes in the US as it moves inland through mid-week.
Beryl became the first storm in the Atlantic hurricane season to make landfall in the US after tearing a devastating path through the Caribbean, where it caused at least 8 other deaths. The storm marks the start to a hurricane season that experts say will be far from normal as fossil fuel pollution contributes to abnormally warm water and rapidly intensifying storms.
The center of the storm will arrive in Arkansas by Tuesday morning and continue through southern Missouri and Illinois by the end of the day. It is then expected to blow into Indiana on Wednesday morning and race through Ohio and Michigan and into Canada by the end of the week.
Tornado watches are in effect for more than 3 million people across parts of eastern Texas, northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas through early Tuesday. Already, 10 tornado reports have been recorded in those states.
Flood watches also cover over 8 million people from eastern Texas to southern Illinois, most of which will expire by the end of the day Tuesday.
The weatherman warned about the likelihood of further tornadoes and flooding as Beryl, now a tropical depression, moved northeastward. The extreme heat predicted for the affected regions could exacerbate the challenging conditions for recovery efforts.
