Houston still without power days after Beryl passed

More than a million homes remain without power amid a stifling heat alert in Houston, Texas, the fourth-largest city in the United States, which has had to improvise cooling centers to mitigate the lack of air conditioning.

The loss of power following Hurricane Beryl on Monday has sparked criticism from the community regarding cyclone preparedness.

By midday Thursday, more than a million CenterPoint Energy customers, the main energy provider in Houston and South Texas, were without power, following several days of unrelenting high temperatures.

People have been complaining that they have lost food in their refrigerators and that children and the elderly in particular have no way to withstand the record-breaking temperatures in the country.

Frustration and criticism from users have put pressure on City Hall, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire having to challenge the company to speed up repairs.

“I’m not in the business of rating. I’m in the business of saying, ‘Let’s do it.’ We demand that they do better,” he said of CenterPoint Energy during a news conference Wednesday.

Special measure

Several cooling centers have been set up in the city and Harris County, while the company has supplied generators to hospitals that were forced to transfer patients to a suitable hospital.

Beryl has claimed the lives of at least eight people, seven of them in the state of Texas, and one in Louisiana, and authorities fear that the death toll might rise due to the lack of air conditioning during a wave of extreme heat and humidity that has extended into Thursday night.

The storm left regarding 2.7 million people without power on Monday, including 2.3 million CenterPoint Energy customers, which has warned that at least 750,000 customers will not have electricity until later this week.

Criticism

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who took charge of the emergency response amid a trip to Asia by Gov. Gregg Abbott, has also faced criticism.

At a conference Thursday in Houston, Patrick used the disaster to fuel his feud with Democratic administrations, lashing out at Harris County County Chief Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, and President Joe Biden, whom he partly blamed for the lack of response.

Houston / EFE