After leaving millions without power in the Houston, Texas, area during a heat wave, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl moved on to the northeastern United States, bringing heavy rain, flooding, high speed winds and tornadoes.
As Beryl left Texas and began making its way northeast, it flooded neighborhoods in Arkansas, with two confirmed tornadoes barreling through Kentucky and Indiana earlier this week, per ABC News.
Flooding concerns due to heavy rain spanned from the Great Lakes region to New England to southern Canada. The Associated Press reported that “tens of thousands of customers lost power in New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to PowerOutage.us.” The National Weather Service confirmed at least one tornado touched down in upstate New York, according to AP.
In neighboring Vermont, some areas were hit with flash flooding, prompting dozens of evacuations and rescues. Many Vermont towns affected by the flooding are the same communities that were “devastated by record rain and flooding a year ago,” per The New York Times.
Now a post-tropical cyclone, the deadly storm has been attributed to at least 10 deaths in the U.S. so far — including nine people in Texas and one person in Louisiana, NBC News reported.
Texans still without electricity during heat wave
As of Thursday morning, more than a million Houston residents are still without power amid a heat wave, and many will not have their electricity restored until the end of this weekend, per ABC.
Many communities are utilizing churches and sporting event complexes in order to keep cool, access water and receive aid.
Now in the fourth day without power after Beryl touched down on southeast Texas early Monday, frustrations are mounting among residents and both state and federal officials. At the center of widespread criticism is CenterPoint Energy, an electric and natural gas company that services Houston, a city which is widely recognized as the Energy Capital of the World.
At a city council meeting Wednesday, Houston Mayor John Whitmire criticized CenterPoint, saying the company “needs to do a better job” at restoring electricity, according to the Houston Chronicle. “They will be held accountable,” Whitmire said, per The Wall Street Journal.
Texas Rep. Sylvia Garcia said the slow pace of the restoration of residents’ electricity is a public health crisis, per Reuters.
CenterPoint vice president of electric distribution operations and power delivery, Brad Tutunjian, said this was the “largest outage in our history,” and that the company has never experienced an event as severe as this, CNN reported.
In a statement posted to the company’s website, Lynnae Wilson, senior vice president of electric business, said, “We understand how difficult it is for our customers to be without power, particularly in this summer heat. Having substantially completed our damage assessment and restoration of customers impacted by circuit related outages, our crews are now focusing on repairing more localized damage, including in the hardest-hit areas. We know that our customers are counting on us, and we are committed to working as safely and quickly as we can until every last customer is back on.”
In recent years, CenterPoint has put nearly $1.5 billion toward making Houston’s electric grid more resilient against extreme weather conditions, but the provider “failed to hit some state targets for reliability,” per the Journal.
A CenterPoint update on the outages outlines a rough timeline, one in which the company said it expects to restore power to another 750,000 customers by the end of the weekend, according to The Washington Post, which would leave nearly 400,000 customers who are likely to be without power for an entire week after Beryl’s initial hit.