The city’s widespread outage is a preview of how bad things could get this hurricane season.
The most troubling part is that Beryl wasn’t even that severe. It was a strong Category 1 hurricane, but it wasn’t as powerful a storm as Hurricane Ike, which, when it hit the city in 2008, was flirting with Category 3 status. (Ike left parts of the city without power for weeks.) And Beryl moved through quickly, unlike Hurricane Harvey, which parked itself over Houston for four days in 2017 and dropped several feet of rain. By Gulf hurricane standards, Beryl was pretty modest—and still, much of Houston is paralyzed. As of this afternoon, five days after the storm, 854,000 customers still have no power. CenterPoint did eventually release an outage map, and it’s a wild visual artifact. Much of the city and surrounding Harris County is highlighted blue, meaning those areas have been assessed and are waiting to be eventually “energized.” All this as summer temperatures push into the 90s, with “feels like” temps nearing or at triple digits.
Moderate storms like Beryl are concerning because they reveal just how fragile Houston’s power infrastructure has become. A fierce derecho hit the city on May 16, cutting off power for nearly 1 million customers. The devastation to the grid was most evident in alarming, widely shared photos of transmission lines toppled and bent like toy pipe cleaners. It took CenterPoint about a week to restore power to most of those affected customers.
