Millions of Texans still lack power as temperatures climb

Biden blames Texas officials for delayed federal response to Beryl

Some Texans frustrated with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and main power company CenterPoint Energy (formerly Reliant Energy) not providing residents with an outage tracker found a better alternative — the app for Texas-based fast food chain Whataburger. X/Twitter account @BBQBryan posted a viral tweet Monday night showing a screenshot of the Whataburger app's locations in the Houston Metro area, with locations that were open colored in orange and the ones that were still closed colored in grey.

"The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker, handy since the electric company doesn't show a map," @BBQBryan wrote in the tweet that has since been viewed more than seven million times. "Still nearly 1.9 million power outages."

Texas is receiving federal aid for Hurricane Beryl later than needed because state leaders were slow to request an official disaster declaration from the White House, President Joe Biden told the Houston Chronicle Tuesday.

With Gov. Greg Abbott out of the country on an economic development trip in Asia, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has served as acting governor amid the storm, making him responsible for putting in the state’s request for aid.

A White House spokesperson told the Chronicle that officials had tried multiple times to reach Abbott and Patrick, and Biden said he only connected with Patrick Tuesday, after which he issued the disaster declaration. Beryl came ashore on Texas' Gulf Coast early Monday morning, bringing heavy rain and winds that wreaked havoc over Houston and other parts of southeast Texas.

In a statement early Tuesday evening, Biden noted that FEMA resources had been on the ground in Texas “since well before the storm." That included 500,000 meals and 800,000 liters of water that were "ready to distribute at the state's request," FEMA officials said in a statement Monday. The agency also deployed 60 generators "to provide power to critical infrastructure, if needed."

The disaster declaration includes 121 counties, including Harris County and other parts of southeast Texas that were hit hard by Beryl, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

Millions of Texans are heading into a third summer day without power after Hurricane Beryl wreaked havoc through several counties — including the state’s most populous one — and temperatures rose dangerously into the 90s. The heat index is projected to push past 100 degrees in some areas, compounding the risk for an already battered and worn out area.

State and local officials navigate residents’ frustrations at what’s becoming routine in Texas: massive power outages after winter storms, thunderstorms, tornadoes or hurricanes.

“The power system is a life saving critical infrastructure — it’s the difference between life and death,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “The era of nobody could have foreseen these conditions is over.”

Heat is known as a silent killer. The harm it causes can be more complex than, say, a tornado or fire. But extreme heat causes more deaths per year than any other weather-related hazard, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Heat can make people weak, dizzy and faint. In severe cases, people develop heat stroke that causes organ damage or death.

“When you factor in not only having no AC, warmer temperatures, and then also a higher heat index, that increases humidity, that muggy feeling out there, which adds to the uncomfortable feeling,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Knapp. “With the heat index being higher, it can definitely lead to heat stress and heat related illness. It makes it feel like it's significantly warmer out there than it actually is.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, most electricity customers in coastal Brazoria and Matagorda counties lacked power, as did most of Polk, San Jacinto and Montgomery counties. A sizable portion of Harris County, the state’s most populous, also remained without power. It is unclear exactly how many customers are without power in greater Houston because CenterPoint Energy’s outage tracker is unavailable. CenterPoint maintains the power poles and wires that deliver electricity in Houston and its surrounding communities.

Restoring power to Texans is the state’s No. 1 priority, officials emphasized during a Tuesday press briefing in Galveston County, where at least 45% of people still lack power, based on estimates from PowerOutage.us, which is not tracking customers who rely on CenterPoint. But progress is slow, and questions lingered about whether the state and its primary power utilities were adequately prepared for the storm.

Former labor organizer Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who is president of the youth activist organization NextGen America, observed that "We’re truly living in a dystopia when a fast-food chain is doing more to track outages during a severe weather event than the f*&king state of Texas." X user @USA_Comrade reacted to the initial tweet by posting the popular meme of North Korean defector Yeonmi Park — who famously went on Joe Rogan's podcast and contrasted dubious accounts of life in the hermit kingdom with life in the United States — with the text: "In America you have to check power outages on a hamburger app because the privately owned utilities are incompetent."