Houston is on the brink of a total energy crisis

For the 2.2 million people in Houston who lost power Monday after Hurricane Beryl swept through the city, the first question on their minds was When will the electricity be restored? CenterPoint Energy, the city’s utility, didn’t yet have an online outage map. There was a workaround, though. “Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker,” tweeted a user who goes by the name BBQ Bryan, along with a screenshot of the beloved local fast food chain’s location map on its app. It did, in a helpful and absurd way, track the city’s actual outages. The silver lining was that it let people know where to buy a Whatameal.

It was a frustrating and unsatisfactory solution to what seems to be a frustrating and unsatisfactory situation that Houstonians once again find themselves in. Houston bills itself as the energy capital of the world, as it is home to thousands of energy-related businesses. Yet, in a Texas-sized irony, this is the third time This year that large parts of the city were left without electricity for several days.

The most troubling thing is that Beryl wasn’t even that bad. It was a Category 1 hurricane, but not as powerful as Hurricane Ike, which, when it hit the city in 2008, was flirting with Category 3 status. (Ike left parts of the city without power for weeks.) And Beryl moved quickly, unlike Hurricane Harvey, which paused over Houston for four days in 2017 and dropped several feet of rain. By Gulf hurricane standards, Beryl was pretty modest — and yet much of Houston is paralyzed. This afternoon, five days after the storm, 854,000 customers still don’t have power. CenterPoint finally released a map of the outages, and it’s an incredible visual artifact. Much of the city and surrounding Harris County are highlighted in blue, meaning those areas have been assessed and are waiting to be “powered.” All this as summer temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with “feels like” temperatures near or into the triple digits.

Moderate storms like Beryl are worrisome because they reveal how fragile Houston’s electrical infrastructure has become. A severe derecho hit the city on May 16, knocking out power to nearly a million customers. The grid’s devastation was particularly evident in alarming, widely shared photos of toppled transmission lines bent like pipe cleaners. It took CenterPoint about a week to restore power to most affected customers. Then, two weeks later, on May 28, a severe storm hit the city with hurricane-force winds, knocking out power to 325,000 people. CenterPoint restored service in about two days. Beryl’s restoration efforts will take at least a week for some. As of mid-afternoon today, the utility had restored power to about 1.4 million customers, and CenterPoint said it aims to “restore 80% of affected customers by the end of the day Sunday.”

These power outages obviously mean no electricity to homes, which is a huge inconvenience at best and a deadly scenario at worst, but also businesses across the city have lost millions of dollars and countless hours of productivity. Tons of food have been wasted, both in personal refrigerators and at local restaurants that have little margin for maneuver and can probably recover from one outage, but maybe not three. Doctors’ appointments have been canceled and medical treatments have been delayed. Traffic lights are suspended in mid-air, worsening traffic jams in the country’s fourth-largest city. Every time the power goes out, lives are put on hold indefinitely while people wait for their worlds to start working again.

All this and it’s only July. We’ve only reached B in hurricane naming conventions. We are still a few weeks away from the peak hurricane months of August and September, in what is expected to be an “above normal season.”

Read: Hurricane Beryl is a terrifying omen

Houstonians are unfortunately no strangers to this. Many people have invested in generators, which have become an essential household appliance, to power things like refrigerators, fans and portable air conditioners. But there have been problems even getting gas to fill those generators. Gas stations without power mean idle pumps. And with limited power in the city, cars line up 10, 20, 30 deep at stations that aren’t working. are functioning. A writer at the Houston Chronicle I waited three and a half hours to fill up. I witnessed the chaos firsthand on Tuesday, when I drove from Austin to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment (which was ultimately canceled, surprise). On the way, I stopped at Buc-ee’s in Waller, Texas, about 25 miles outside the Houston city limits. Buc-ee’s, a beloved Texas institution, the gas station chain known for its impossibly huge convenience stores and wonderfully clean restrooms, is usually very busy. But I had never seen anything like it. Nearly every one of its dozens of gas pumps was servicing a car as people circled the massive parking lot looking for an empty spot. Its thousands-square-foot store was bustling with customers. People had driven miles, just to fill up, for the comfort and perhaps a brief respite from an air-conditioned building.

Five days into this disaster, we’ve entered the phase of the weather-disaster cycle where politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders make Spiderman memes. A blame game is being played out in the media between Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (who is acting as acting governor while Greg Abbott is away) and County Judge Lina Hidalgo over who responded to what and when. Meanwhile, most of the inflammatory rhetoric has been directed at CenterPoint. “Why did so many of CenterPoint’s power lines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid reinforced and the vegetation cut down?” the Chronicle Columnist Chris Tomlinson recently lamented that someone tagged an I-10 underpass with the word “CenterPointless,” mare painted like dollar signs.

CenterPoint defended its response to the storm, noting that “trees in the Greater Houston area also contributed significantly to the outages because they were vulnerable due to severe freezes, drought, and heavy rains over the past three years.” It’s true that there have been plenty of storms, including the devastating Winter Storm Uri in 2021 that severely damaged trees and brush across the state. But, as many Houstonians have cried out, CenterPoint and city officials have had years to address issues like tree insecurity and to shore up Houston’s infrastructure for a never-ending future of hurricanes. As cities around the world adapt to the climate crisis, Houston looks like a worst-case scenario of what happens when infrastructure doesn’t evolve to meet the moment. Worse storms will come. Will the city be prepared?

I was born and raised in Houston. My parents and most of my extended family still live there, and I visit often. It’s a place I love deeply, and I’ve been telling people for years that Houston is the greatest city in America with the kind of arrogance that only a Texan can unapologetically display. It’s an easy argument to make. Houston has cutting-edge medical centers, world-class museums, and a thriving culinary scene. It’s the most diverse city in the country, with about 145 languages ​​spoken. It’s the birthplace of Beyoncé. But my faith in that claim is shaken. I’ve seen tweets from even the most engaged Houstonians wondering if it’s time to move. Houston is an inventive and resourceful place. I want to have faith that the energy capital of the world can figure out how to keep itself powered. Regardless, hurricane season is just beginning.