Why Hurricane Beryl was more than Houston could handle

After Hurricane Beryl made landfall in southeast Texas at Category 1 strength earlier this week, it left extensive flooding and power outages for nearly 3 million homes and businesses in its wake. As of Friday morning, more than a million electricity customers in Texas are still in the dark. 

Hurricane Beryl was unprecedented in many ways — it marked the earliest time in the hurricane season that a tropical storm grew to Category 5 strength when it reached that level on July 2 — yet it was also predictable. So were its consequences. 

Extraordinarily warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean served as fuel for the storm while a rising La Niña in the Pacific Ocean created a fertile atmosphere for hurricane formation, allowing Beryl’s winds to whip up to 170 miles per hour. Scientists tracking these trends have been warning of an “above-normal” hurricane season for months.  

But the storm’s impacts on vulnerable infrastructure and its convergence with severe temperatures were just as foreseeable. 

Beryl is the latest example of a compound disaster, where multiple extreme weather events intersect at the same time, or where the fallout from one exacerbates the damages from another. 

It’s just one thing after another

Beryl struck a region that’s still recovering from destruction caused by wind and water this year. The Houston area experienced severe flooding at the beginning of May after a torrential downpour drenched the area in upward of 23 inches of rain. A band of intense thunderstorms known as a derecho then galloped across Texas on May 16 and charged into Houston, tearing off roofs, shattering windows, and knocking down power lines. Another burst of thunderstorms and tornadoes erupted over Memorial Day weekend, lashing Houston with winds up to 88 miles per hour. 

These back-to-back storms stressed infrastructure and depleted emergency resources. They also left little time to rebuild, let alone harden streets, power lines, and sewer systems against future disasters. 

Then Beryl brought its own suite of destruction. It pushed a life-threatening storm surge onto the coast, dumped up to 15 inches of rain, and even spawned tornadoes that pushed trees over into homes and utility poles. Power companies are warning residents to stay at least 35 feet away from downed power lines. 

Now a heat wave is baking the region, threatening vulnerable Houstonians who don’t have power right as they need it the most. At a city council meeting this week, officials pressed a representative from CenterPoint Energy, the main power provider in Houston, about the ongoing outages. 

As Colleen DeGuzman reported for Houston Public Media, Brad Tutunjiun, CenterPoint’s vice president of regulatory policy, told the meeting that his company had conducted drills and mustered repair crews ahead of Beryl. But he noted that “the storms are more frequent. They’re more severe, and our paradigm on how we look at things has to change.”

Officials weren’t assuaged. “We’re past the time of saying that this wasn’t predictable,” said city council member Abbie Kamin. 

CenterPoint did apply for a $100 million grant last year from the US Department of Energy to bolster its wires and poles to withstand severe weather, but the agency denied the proposal. 

Houston Mayor John Whitmire laid some of the blame for the slow recovery on a lack of preparation on the part of the city before he took office. “Yes, I’m angry at the level of neglect at this stage,” he told the city council. 

The city is no stranger to severe weather, and its flat, paved, low-lying terrain has long made it notorious for flooding. The most vivid example was Hurricane Harvey seven years ago, which doused Houston with an extraordinary 27 trillion gallons of water, the rainiest hurricane ever measured in the Atlantic. It racked up $125 billion in damages, making it the second most costly hurricane to make landfall in the continental US after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

And the state of Texas has become infamous for the weaknesses in its energy infrastructure. The Texas power grid is largely isolated from its neighbors so it can’t easily draw power from other states when its supply is disrupted. Its freewheeling state energy market prioritizes abundant cheap electricity over maintaining backup power reserves and investments to protect against severe weather. 

These factors combined to cause widespread blackouts across the state after Winter Storm Uri in 2021 froze natural gas pipelines, coal piles, wind turbines, and solar panels just as chilly Texans cranked up the heat. The state is also struggling to keep up with summertime energy demand as average temperatures rise and cooling needs grow.  

The future is likely to pose even greater challenges. Texas’s population is growing, so there will be more people who will need more energy. And climate change is worsening the effects of many of these disasters, raising average temperatures and water levels. That means more Texans are likely to end up in harm’s way when a disaster strikes. 

This pattern is repeating across many parts of the world. Much of humanity will remain haunted by past disasters as the specters of more catastrophes lurk over the horizon.

Mitigating these risks thus requires thinking beyond hurricanes as stand-alone events, and instead as phenomena built on the wreckage of past storms whose shock waves will reverberate for years to come.