Whataburger app gives Houston residents a reliable map of power outages

With CenterPoint Energy still not providing an outage map for areas affected by Hurricane Beryl, frustrated Houstonians are turning to the Whataburger app to find places to get their power back.

“I found that the Whataburger app at least lets me know where to find electricity,” said Dave McBride, who lives in the Copperfield area with his girlfriend, Tiffany Clark. “I haven’t found anything more reliable yet.”

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Despite being hit hardest, west Houston has more Whataburgers open than east Houston.

Screenshot of the Whataburger app at 2:37 PM on July 9, 2024

Hurricane Beryl hit Houston early Monday morning as a Category 1 hurricane. As of 9 a.m., more than 2 million people were without power. That number began to gradually decline around 3 p.m., but more than 1.5 million people remain without power as temperatures climb back into the 90s.
CenterPoint has provided regular updates and promised around-the-clock work, but a quick look at the company’s social media platforms shows people are desperate and angry because more concrete maps and ETAs on when the service will return have not been released.

As the second day of widespread power outages began Tuesday morning, enterprising Houstonians realized that the city’s map of open Whataburger restaurants in their app was functional. While only a handful of the 30-plus restaurants are open, and those that are have long lines, it gives a rough approximation of which ZIP codes have power. If Whataburger is open, that could mean that nearby stores are, too.

“Houstonians are resourceful people when it comes to natural disasters,” said Natalie Lynn Ward, chair-elect of the Montgomery County Democratic Party. “But we all wish CenterPoint’s outage tracking system would give us the information we all want to know. How long will it be before the power is restored?”

During the Derecho storm in May, it took CenterPoint more than 24 hours to produce a map showing which ZIP codes were still undergoing work and when they could expect power back. The level of frustration was similar then, though it has begun to ease as more neighborhoods got power back on schedule.

“We are working around the clock to restore power to the 2.26 million customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl,” CenterPoint said in a press release Tuesday afternoon. “The first hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, Beryl has had a significant impact on CenterPoint’s service territory, with winds reaching 97 miles per hour in Brazoria County, 89 miles per hour in Harris County and 78 miles per hour in Galveston County, according to the National Weather Service in Houston-Galveston.”

CenterPoint says it has 12,000 workers on the ground, many of whom were mobilized and ready before the storm made landfall.

In the meantime, Houstonians are making do with the Whataburger app. It doesn’t give an estimate of when things might return to normal, but it does at least show where things stand so far.

“It seems like the storm did more for the Whataburger app than all their advertising,” Clark says.