Houston area residents struggle without power and water as excruciating heat continues

By Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough and Elizabeth Wolfe, CNN

(CNN) — Half a million Houston-area homes and businesses may not have their power restored until next week amid sweltering summer heat, even as many in the region struggle to access fresh food, air conditioning and safe drinking water.

More than 1 million power customers in southeast Texas – mainly between Galveston and north of Houston – are still without power after Hurricane Beryl hurtled into the Gulf Coast on Monday, leaving at least 10 people dead in Texas, two dead in Vermont and one dead in Louisiana.

The outages have debilitated infrastructure across the region, including hospitals, assisted living facilities and water treatment plants, leading to mounting frustrations from residents that Houston’s main utility, CenterPoint Energy, was not more prepared for the storm.

Though the utility is racing to make repairs, a CenterPoint executive said roughly 500,000 customers will not have electrical power restored until sometime next week.

The fatal destruction wrought by Hurricane Beryl extended to Vermont, where more than 100 people in Vermont had to be rescued. Two people were found dead in floodwaters there after the storm brought dramatic flooding to the state on Wednesday.

John Rice, 73, was found dead Thursday after he drove into a flooded street in Lyndonville, and a current washed the car off the road into a hay field flooded with 10 feet of water, Lyndonville Police Chief Jack T. Harris told CNN in an email. The body of Dylan Kempton, 33, was also recovered from floodwaters early Thursday morning by first responders, according to a Vermont State Police news release. He was riding a UTV that was washed off the road when a culvert breached.

In Texas, the sustained power outages and devastating heat come even as many residents face substantial repairs of homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Beryl and the disastrous flooding it wrought along the coast. Waters were still receding from some coastal communities and roadways on Thursday, Texas Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said in a news conference.

Houston area resident Frankie Thibideaux said her home remained swamped with water for days and became moldy in the heat. After two days, the 57-year-old couldn’t stand to stay there any longer and left the residential building in Missouri City to stay in a hotel.

“We can’t live in a place like that,” she said. “I won’t even let my dog live like those people are.”

The conditions have had life-threatening – and at times deadly – consequences. A 71-year-old woman died near Crystal Beach after her oxygen machine ran out of battery power and her generator shut down. And at least two people have died from carbon monoxide poisoning in Harris County, where fire departments have responded to more than 200 carbon monoxide poisoning calls from people attempting to use generators.

Scores of homes are also without drinking water as storm damage and power outages have left 135 wastewater treatment plants offline, according to Kidd. Boil water notices stretch across eight counties in the Houston and Galveston areas, he added, noting water is being distributed across impacted communities.

Adding to residents’ distress are 90-degree temperatures that have baked the area every day this week and will continue into next week. The heat index – a measurement of how the body feels under both heat and humidity – could reach 106 degrees in some areas Friday, a life-threatening scenario for people without adequate cooling.

Tensions are running high as people become desperate for relief. Fort Bend County Sheriff Eric Fagan called for calm after the department received a report a man pulled a gun on a CenterPoint Energy worker – behavior the sheriff’s office “will not tolerate.”

A dozen Houston area hospitals are in a state of “internal disaster” and more than 40 dialysis clinics are struggling with outages, Kidd said. City officials are working to move dialysis patients to other locations and distribute generators to in-need facilities “as fast as possible,” he added.

After Houston area hospitals determined it would be unsafe to discharge patients to homes without power, several locations became backed up, prompting city officials to organize overflow beds in an indoor sports stadium, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Tuesday.

Residents who are elderly or suffer from chronic illnesses are particularly at risk for heat-related illnesses, creating a dire scenario for the network of nursing homes and assisted living facilities still without power in the Houston area. Some such facilities are relying on an improvised patchwork of portable A/Cs and generators to protect their most vulnerable residents, some of whom rely on electronic medical devices to live.

“Every day, it just seems to get worse and worse and worse,” said Matthew Marchetti, co-founder of CrowdSource Rescue, a non-profit founded during Hurricane Harvey primarily serving as a search-and-rescue group.

Marchetti’s group of volunteers has helped deliver generators and supplies to 16 independent living facilities for seniors, but they’ve identified roughly 120 facilities in need of help.

“The whole city is hurting and suffering. That’s what it feels like right now, from my vantage point,” he said. “But I think for the seniors, they’re taking the brunt of it. So we’re trying to do everything we can.”

Martin Cominsky, President and CEO of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, oversees the Meals on Wheels program in the area, which serves 4,500 people over the age of 60 with hot meals every day. He said most of their clients don’t have power right now, and staff who deliver food are offering their own cell phones to help seniors connect with loved ones, since many of their phones are dead.

“We keep going back day after day,” he said. “No job is too small or too hard in times like these.”

Utility faces barrage of criticism

Houston’s primary utility company, CenterPoint Energy, is responsible for a majority of the outages and is fielding growing frustration from residents and local officials who say the utility should have been more prepared for the storm.

Though the utility said it had restored service to more than 1.3 million customers by Thursday night, roughly 500,000 will remain in the dark until sometime next week, according to a CenterPoint Energy executive who spoke Thursday before the Texas Public Utility Commission.

The homes and businesses most deeply affected by the outage are those suffering massive electrical infrastructure damage from Hurricane Beryl, including the southern side of Houston and up through the Interstate 45 corridor, said Jason Ryan, one of the utility’s executive vice presidents.

“We know we still have a lot of work to do,” said Ryan. “I know customers are frustrated.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has requested an investigation into how CenterPoint and other power companies responded to Hurricane Beryl, Patrick, the lieutenant governor, said Thursday.

“I’m sure we will find that there are things they could have done better,” Patrick said.

Some residents have complained of a lack of communication from the utility, leaving people with little idea when they will have power again. The company responded to customer complaints its outage map shows areas have power when, in reality, they don’t.

“We’re working on the accuracy right now,” CenterPoint Vice President of Operations Darin Carroll told CNN affiliate KHOU. “We track it constantly. We’re making adjustments to the map as we speak. The other thing I want customers to know is even if you see yourself in that green on the map, don’t worry; we know you’re out of power, and we are gonna get to you.”

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells said he is proud of the progress the company has made toward restoration but acknowledged customers’ frustrations about not knowing when they will have power again.

“I think we could do a better job of communicating expectations with our customers, and I personally own that,” Wells told the Chronicle.

CNN has reached out to CenterPoint Energy for comment.

Ryan, the CenterPoint Energy executive, said the company started tracking Hurricane Beryl nine days before the storm made landfall.

Just after July 4, days before the storm hit the Texas coast, the company put out its first request for 3,000 “mutual assistance” workers to pre-position ahead of the storm. As the path of the storm shifted closer to the Houston area before landfall, CenterPoint increased the request to 10,000, he said.

In response to growing anger toward CenterPoint, several members of the Texas Public Utility Commission urged the utility’s leadership to improve its communication and “rebuilding trust” with customers in the hurricane-damaged areas.

“Infrastructure is going to break. Things are going to happen. But if people feel like they’re being effectively communicated with, it makes it a lot easier to go through. And so, I’d say get out into the community and go talk to your customers,” said commission chairman Thomas Gleeson.

The ongoing outages have also prompted renewed discussions about Texas’ power grid.

During a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was asked by a reporter if the state is considering modifying the power grid, which has encountered several issues over the years due to severe weather.

“The grid is a whole different issue which we’re addressing, have been addressing, and will continue to address,” Patrick said. “The power is down because the lines are down, and the transmission lines are down primarily because trees fell on them.”

Patrick addressed a report by a local media which mentioned burying the lines, which he said would be “prohibitively expensive.”

Scorching summer shows no sign of stopping

Texas is not alone as it suffers from a brutally hot summer. The US is experiencing a historically hot and deadly summer – and the hottest days are yet to come.

This has so far been the hottest summer on record for around 100 US cities from Maine to California, and heat is suspected in the deaths of at least 37 people in July alone. That number is likely an underestimate, given the amount of time it takes to attribute a death to nature’s deadliest form of extreme weather.

Many of the deaths have been in the West, where cities have shattered all-time record high temperatures during an unprecedented and long heat wave – exactly the kind of conditions scientists expect in a world warming due to fossil fuel pollution.

Heat is being investigated in the deaths of at least 19 people in Santa Clara County, California, alone, the county’s medical examiner office told CNN.

Everyone is vulnerable to heat, but some are more at risk than others. Children, the elderly, pregnant people, people with heart or blood pressure issues, outdoor workers or anyone without access to reliable cooling are more likely to succumb to heat-related illnesses than others.

At least three of the people who may have succumbed to heat in Santa Clara County were unhoused without adequate access to cooling. Nine were over the age of 65, the county medical examiner told CNN.

The extreme levels of heat in the West will begin to subside this weekend, ushering in a slow return to near – or slightly above normal – summer temperatures. Even without hitting record-high daily temperatures, the region gets quite hot in July.

Heat will be a consistent companion for many Americans through the end of July, as hotter than average temperatures are likely through the end of the month and into at least early August, according to the Climate Prediction Center.

CNN’s Mary Gilbert, Robert Shackelford, Raja Razek, Sarah Dewberry, and Chris Boyette contributed to this report.

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