Hurricane Beryl Leaves 7 Dead and Millions Without Power in its Aftermath
At least eight people have died after Hurricane Beryl slammed into southeast Texas and Louisiana, knocking out power for nearly three million people. Beryl hit the southern United States on Monday morning as a category one hurricane but has since been downgraded to a tropical depression. Officials warned of destructive winds, up to 15 inches (38 cm) of rain, and “life-threatening” storm surges.
More than 1,100 flights were canceled at Houston’s main airport on Monday, according to flightaware.com. Some 2.3 million customers in Texas were without power as of Tuesday morning, said poweroutage.us, with some cuts also reported in Louisiana and Arkansas. CenterPoint Energy, a Texas-based utility provider, said it planned to restore power for at least one million customers by the end of Wednesday.
The storm also caused major destruction and at least 10 deaths in the Caribbean. In the US, officials said seven people had died in Texas’s Harris and Montgomery counties, while one more fatality was confirmed in neighboring Louisiana. A 53-year-old man died after winds downed power lines and knocked a tree onto his home in Harris County, causing his roof to collapse. In the same county, which includes parts of Houston, 73-year-old grandmother Maria Loredo was reported dead after a tree crashed through the roof of her home, according to CBS affiliate KHOU.
Loredo’s family told the news station she was home with her son, his wife, and her two grandchildren, ages two and seven, when the tree fell. No other family members were injured. Also in Harris County, a Houston Police Department employee, Russell Richardson, 54, drowned after attempting to drive through high water on his way to work, according to Houston police. Another person died in a house fire that is believed to have been sparked by lightning, Houston’s mayor said.
Three people were also killed in Montgomery County. Officials say one man was killed when a tree fell on him while he was driving a tractor, and two homeless people died when a tree fell on their tent, reports KHOU. Houston is a low-lying coastal city, making it prone to flooding. Sustained wind speeds in the Houston area reached 75 mph (120 km/h) with wind gusts reaching 87 mph as the storm struck.
Beryl is expected to continue to lose strength as it gradually tracks north-northeast, but flash flooding and heavy rain remain a risk, according to the National Hurricane Center. In Louisiana, where over 20,000 people were without power due to the storm on Tuesday morning, one person was killed on Monday when a tree fell on her home in the town of Benton, according to a local sheriff.
The National Weather Service (NWS) said Beryl spawned a tornado on Monday in Louisiana. On Tuesday, the risk of twisters shifts to Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, said forecasters. The ports of Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, Freeport, and Texas City were all closed. More than 2,500 emergency responders have been made ready to deal with Beryl’s aftermath, including members of the Texas National Guard. Beryl was expected to move east across America’s central states, including Mississippi, later in the week. It was forecast to skip central and west Texas, areas currently experiencing moderate to severe levels of drought.
At one stage, Beryl became the earliest category five hurricane ever recorded. In the Caribbean, it hit St Vincent and the Grenadines, Mayreau and Union, and Grenada especially hard. The storm was also one of the most powerful to ever pummel Jamaica. Beryl brought heavy rain to the tourist hotspots of Cancún and Tulum in southern Mexico. While it is difficult to attribute specific storms to climate change as the causes are complex, exceptionally high sea surface temperatures are seen as a key reason why Hurricane Beryl has been so powerful. It is the first hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic season but the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned that the North Atlantic could get as many as seven major hurricanes this year – up from an average of three in a season.
Restoring power to millions of Texans slammed by the deadly and destructive storm Beryl could take days or even weeks, posing a dangerous scenario for residents without air conditioning as triple-digit heat index temperatures hit the state. 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 eight people dead in Texas and Louisiana. More than 1.7 million customers, mostly in Galveston up through Houston, are still without power Tuesday night, according to PowerOutage.us. At least 34 utilities are experiencing outages.
The storm unleashed flooding rains and winds that transformed roads into rushing rivers, ripped through power lines, and tossed trees onto homes, roads, and cars. President Biden granted a federal emergency disaster declaration for parts of Texas due to Beryl’s destruction, acting Texas Gov. Dan Patrick announced Tuesday. “FEMA’s assistance with these costs will expedite the recovery process and help ensure the safety of Texans impacted by Hurricane Beryl,” Patrick said.
The emergency declaration will grant 75% reimbursement for debris cleanup for all 121 impacted Texas counties, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd said at a Tuesday news conference. What’s left of Beryl is hurtling into the Midwest. Despite having lost strength and its core, it still threatens to trigger more flooding and tornadoes along its path.
As difficult recovery and cleanup efforts are underway in southeast Texas, including the Houston area, extreme heat is bearing down on the region Tuesday and will continue for much of the week, creating hazardous conditions for those working outdoors, the elderly, people with chronic medical conditions, children, and those without adequate cooling. The heat index in Houston passed 100 degrees on Tuesday. The heat index measures how the body feels under both heat and humidity. Both Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and William P. Hobby Airport reported a heat index of 103 degrees by early Tuesday afternoon. Air temperatures in the region will climb into the 90s through at least early next week.
When a person is unable to cool their body down amid prolonged heat, they are at risk for damage to the brain and other vital organs, as well as other heat-related illnesses such as heat exhaustion and stroke. 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. With some residents opting for generators in the wake of outages, Kidd noted at least two carbon monoxide poisoning deaths have been reported in Harris County, home to Houston. “If you have a generator that you’re running, please make sure it is far away from the area that you are living and sleeping,” Kidd explained, adding such deaths are preventable.
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, and though the company had braced for Beryl’s impact, it said the damage was more severe than it had expected. As of Tuesday night, CenterPoint still had more than 1.3 million customers without service.
“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,” the utility said. That amounts to 80% of CenterPoint’s Houston region customers, company representative Paul Lock said during a Tuesday evening news conference. Earlier Tuesday, Patrick said he has repeatedly urged CenterPoint Energy to “work as quickly as they can” to restore power. “It’s tough to be in the heat. It’s tough now to be able to refrigerate anything and tough not being able to go out and get food,” he added.
The utility had said they expected to restore power to 1 million customers by Wednesday night. CenterPoint also hopes to complete full damage assessments by the end of the Tuesday, company spokesperson Logan Anderson told CNN Tuesday afternoon. In the evening news conference, Lock said he couldn’t give a timeline for power restoration, “but it is not going to be tomorrow.” He said the utility will provide a system-wide restoration timeline after the damage assessments are complete.
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.
In Katy, Texas, just west of Houston, resident Lizzette Varela said her home lost power Monday morning and hasn’t regained it since. Her family is trying to find access to lodging, internet, and food storage on a day-to-day basis, she told CNN. “There is no clear word from CenterPoint. They expect that by Wednesday there will be 1 million more people with electricity, but there’s 2 million people without power. How do you know if you’re part of the 50% with power? It’s like a game,” she said.
Mayor Gregg Bisso of Surfside Beach, Texas – located 60 miles south of Houston – said he is “mad as hell” at CenterPoint, as 90% of the Gulf Coast destination is without power. “We are the first to get hit—and hit the hardest—but because we are over the bridge, we are the last ones to get service back,” Bisso said. Bisso said most residents thankfully heeded a voluntary evacuation order, as Beryl brought sustained winds of well-over 90 mph that damaged countless homes – with some missing whole roofs.
The Houston Zoo is also working to clean up damage and flooding from Beryl, Jackie Wallace, assistant vice president of communications and public affairs, told CNN Tuesday. All the animals are safe and fared well throughout the hurricane and power outage, Wallace said, as the zoo used generators until power was restored late Tuesday morning. A team of staff spent Sunday and Monday overnight at the zoo to ensure the safety of the animals and take care of any emergency issues on the grounds. The animals spent the nights, as usual, safely in their barns, Wallace said.
In recent years, the zoo has undergone extensive upgrades with hurricanes and freezes in mind, which included an office garage being built on campus for staff to ride out storms. The zoo will remain closed until Thursday. Some other businesses are staying open, however. For Crystal Petty, the manager of a Baskin-Robbins in southwestern Houston, business is busier than usual as people clamor for relief from the high temperatures and humidity. “I have a phone call coming in about every 30 minutes with someone asking if we’re open or not,” Petty told CNN. Petty’s store regained power at 7 a.m. Tuesday with most of their products still good to sell – save the ice cream cake display, which had melted from being in the front window. Scoops were being served a cool four hours later. From her correspondence with other local stores, Petty believes her Baskin-Robbins might be the only one in the city still with power.
At its peak, Beryl was a record-shattering Category 5 storm but has since been reduced to a far less powerful system with winds of 30 mph. Still, what’s left of Beryl will 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 nine other deaths. The storm marks the start to a hurricane season 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 continue through Illinois by the end of Tuesday. 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. The threat of tornadoes linked to Beryl increased Tuesday, prompting the Storm Prediction Center to upgrade the risk of severe thunderstorms to a level 3 of 5 for western Kentucky and southern Indiana. Parts of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys are under a level 2 of 5 severe thunderstorm threat, primarily for tornadoes associated with the storms, according to the center. Fourteen tornadoes from Beryl were reported Monday in Texas, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas. About 23.4 million people are under flood watches Tuesday. Flash flood warnings were issued along the storm’s path Tuesday morning.
Heat alerts have been issued Tuesday for about half of the US population, spanning both coasts, but the West coast being hit particularly hard. An oppressive heat wave is blanketing the West and will hover over the region for several more days, likely bringing high temperatures between 10 to 30 degrees above average to some areas. Human-caused climate change is driving far more frequent and intense heat waves across the globe, exposing communities to increasingly dangerous temperatures.
Excessive heat warnings, watches, and heat advisories are in effect for nearly all of Washington state, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, and southwest Arizona. Parts of western Nevada and northeastern California won’t see high temperatures below 100 degrees until next weekend, the National Weather Service office in Reno said. In Oregon, four people died of suspected heat-related illnesses over the weekend, and another suspected heat-related death was reported Monday, according to news releases from Multnomah County. A motorcyclist also died from heat exposure in California’s Death Valley on Saturday, when the high temperature was 128 degrees. In Arizona, a 50-year-old hiker died amid searing temperatures Sunday on the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail, according to the National Park Service.
Source: BBC News, CNN
